Coolbar and Toolbar

[chrisjk]

Hi. I'm using VB6 and was wondering why Microsoft bothered including a background picture property for the coolbar when you can't make the toolbar placed in one of the bands transparent! It's really annoying. Unless I'm missing something...anyone got any ideas. Thanks.

[MartinLiss]

I've never used the CoolBar control, but I did some research and this is what Help has to say.

Displaying Pictures on a CoolBar


The CoolBar control provides several properties that allow a great deal of flexibility in displaying pictures.

When you assign an image to the Picture property of the CoolBar control, that image will be tiled seamlessly across all bands, behind any child controls. By setting the FixedBackground property of a Band object to False, the Image will be tiled within that band.

The Band object has a Picture property that allows you to display a different background picture when the UseCoolbarPicture property is set to False. The Band object also has an Image property which can be used to display an icon to the right of the move handle.

The EmbossPicture property can be used to force an image to be displayed in two colors, similar to the Internet Explorer toolbar. The two colors to be used are determined by the EmbossHighlight and EmbossShadow properties.

When the EmbossPicture property is set to True, the image assigned to the Picture property will be dithered to the EmbossHighlight and EmbossShadow colors. The dithering process uses a fixed threshold to determine which colors in the image will be mapped to the highlight and shadow colors. Choose images with a good definition between dark and light colors for best results.

When I right-clicked on the coolbar I placed on a form on a form, Selected a BMP file for my Band 1's picture, and unchecked FixedBackground, my BMP tiled across the band. Hope this helps.

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Marty

[chrisjk]

Thanks Marty. The Help snippet proved useful with another problem I was having.
But I think the original problem lays with the Toolbar control, in that you can't make the background transparent, showing the background picture of the coolbar, or can you?

A solution to this would be to show the same bmp as a background to the actual toolbar, but I can't find a Picture property (which is why I was using the coolbar in the first place :) !) Am I being mad or is there not one, which seems like a huge oversight to me.

Why do MS make you guess these things all the time? Damn them.

- Chris

[This message has been edited by chrisjk (edited 11-16-1999).]

[This message has been edited by chrisjk (edited 11-16-1999).]

[MartinLiss]

I can't supply any more info because, as I mentioned, I don't use it. :( But did you notice that you (and I?) made the VB-World Newsletter because of these posts? :)

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Marty

[coolcurrent4u]

MartinLiss does that means there is no soluton to makng the toolbar transparent?