Shoutbox

Hi,

I faced this problem already some time ago during Countdown Live 2 development, but I thought it was simply caused by my terrible coding. Maybe it is caused by it, but after so many revisions I think there has to be something else with this...

This is what my script does:

1. I create a popup menu with CreatePopupMenu.
   
2. I add a string menu item to it with AppendMenu.
   
3. I create a HBITMAP from an image:
   
   1. I create a GDI+ Bitmap object from an image file (in my case, "test.gif") using GdipCreateBitmapFromFile.
      
   2. I create a HBITMAP from the Bitmap object using GdipCreateHBITMAPFromBitmap with 0xFF000000 0x00000000 as background parameter (totally transparent, according to Matty Matty made a mistake, PLSC updated).
4. I add the HBITMAP to the menu item:
   
   1. I create a partial MENUITEMINFO structure with the cbSize, fMask and hbmpItem members set.
      
   2. I use SetMenuItemInfo to assign this structure to the menu item.
5. I let the menu pop up when the user clicks on a button using TrackPopupMenu.

This works great! I can have beautiful icons next to my menu items, I even made a whole class which simplifies this process. I was so excited about this until... I sent it to my testers. First response: cool, but the menu item icons have a black background. The cause? I run Vista, my testers have XP. One of my testers also runs Vista and he confirmed that it works on his Vista PC, but not on his XP system.
I received this screenshot from one of my XP testers: (cropped)

I have spent hours trying to figure out why this was happening, but I couldn't find anything. Finally, I gave up and added a Windows version check so that the images would only be added on Vista or higher.

Since then, I periodically gave this problem another attempt to solve it, but today I decided to stop waisting time on it for much longer. I attached an example script of this problem, and if someone can find the missing link and fix this on XP... please, share your discoveries!

From my experimenting, it seems that only the blue component of your background parameter affects the background. Changing it to 0x000000FF yields a bright blue, and values in between (like 0x0000007F) produce dark blues. The alpha, red and green channels seem to be ignored and taken as 0.

I don't know whether it's a problem with your image or a bug with GDI+, but I found some links for you of other people having the same problem: [1] and [2].

Aww... you're giving me headaches, phalanxii!
Unfortunately, I can't do testing myself as all PCs here at home are upgraded to Vista.

So, from what I understand, there are problems with converting a GDI+ Bitmap to a HBITMAP. But, let's say that instead of preserving transparency, would it be easier to create a color mask and create transparency by filtering out one color? Would that solve the need of using GDI+ Bitmaps? Would it be possible in fact?

UPDATE: Okay, markee and NanaFreak use exactly the same function for their Web2Live script to add new signatures to the list. They modify the image list and it works great. I try to add it to a menu item and it fails. So, maybe it's not the bitmap loading, but the bitmap drawing... I guess that we'll have to look at the 4th step, namely the the SetMenuItemInfo part. Any known issues with that bit?

UPDATE 2: Hmm... this looks like an interesting MSDN article: Vista Style Menus. It looks like it's really caused by the menus!

After a read, I think it's clear to me that Vista causes the icons to work, while lower versions don't support it. Maybe an owner-draw could fix it... but I doubt Plus! scripts can actually handle those!

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Therefore, I'd like to submit a request to Patchou:

• Make the menus of MenuButtonControls editable in run-time. Something like PlusWnd::MenuButton_SetMenu(CtrlId, MenuXML) would be great!
  
• Add some kind of support for images in menus. Plus! already does an owner-draw on the menu, so why can't you use that to draw images on it? You already did so with ComboBoxControls!