This topic describes the parts and states that you use to change the appearance of controls when visual styles are enabled. Microsoft Windows draws certain parts for controls and windows and these parts are divided into parent and child parts. Most parts have a state—for example disabled, active, or selected. When you create a control, you decide which parts of the control to apply visual styles to. You divide the control into a main part and zero or more named, child parts. Examples of parts are text areas, drawn shapes, images, and lines. For each part, you can define one or more background images in a single bitmap file. The different backgrounds are usually associated with different states of the control, but do not have to be. For example, if the control is disabled, a shaded background might be used. At run time, the appropriate image can be selected by using an iStateId value as the 1-based index to the correct image.

Parts and States of Standard Controls and Windows

The following table shows the control classes, parts, and states. The values in the table are defined in Vsstyle.h and Vssym32.h.