How to change the default view of controls in Windows?

Question

C++ / C#

Hi all.
Even I can not figure out how to change the default view of windows.
Let's say I created an input field CreateWindow("EDIT", ...); how now to round off the edges, make a shadow, change the background, set the color of the stroke and the text in it? And the same goes for buttons.
Please don't suggest QT and stuff

Answer 1

In Winapi, you cannot flexibly change the appearance of controls, as you can do in HTML/CSS.
I can say about the button.
Set its style to BS_OWNERDRAW, and in the parent window handle the WM_DRAWITEM message and draw the button however you like. That is, you essentially have to repeat the behavior of the button from scratch in all its states (cursor hovered/pressed/released/disabled, etc.). Depending on what you want to achieve, you can use GDI/GDI+ or another graphics library for rendering. If you want the button to look like a standard button, use the Visual Styles API.
With Edit control it is more difficult. It does not support ownerdraw. To remove a border, make sure it doesn't have the WS_BORDER and WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE styles.
To change the text or background color, handle WM_CTLCOLOREDIT in the parent window. You can manually draw the shadow and border around the edit control in the parent window.