If you want your menus to look exactly like the Office XP/VS.NET menus then you're going to have to draw everything yourself. This means creating your own whole window, rather than just doing owner-draw of menus.
If you look at the way Office XP/VS.NET work, you'll discover that the 'menus' that appear are actually all a window of class MsoCommandBarPopup. This is a top-level window (it's not a child of the application window) which seems to be used to display menus. So it's not a real menu, which is why it is able to get rid of the standard 3D surround you get on system-supplied menus. There are various problems with doing this yourself that make this hard: (1) It's a lot more effort. You pretty much have to abandon all of the built-in Windows Forms support for Menu objects, and build something to replace it from scratch. (2) You also have to recreate the standard menu interactions. This is more effort than you might think - you have to handle accelerators and shortcuts, and the modal behaviour associated with the Alt key. (And of course all the normal tracking of mouse movements, and the corresponding redraws.) (3) If you want the nice transparent drop shadow that system menus have (on Windows XP anyway) you'll need to arrange for the window to have a per-pixel alpha channel. I don't know if you can do this without using interop - I think Windows Forms only supports per-window transparency settings. (You can set a transparent region, but that's different. To get a drop shadow you want to have different transparency in different places.) -- Ian Griffiths DevelopMentor ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joao Santa Barbara" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Hi people... o saw all the explanations ...but i still have a question ... how can i draw my xp / vs menus without the aperance in 3d ... if you saw the link that luis abreu give you will notice that the blue rectangle has been drawned in the far left of the menu but isnīt in the beggining of the menu... The dotnet menus have a brown line ( i think ) from the top of the menu to the bottom , but i have tried to make the same thing, and nothing happens :( You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
