tproli wrote:those non-ARGB icons
Well there might be hope for ARGB icons after all. I don't give up easily, and it was really starting to get on my nerves. Quite a few people have complained about it actually, and so many other developers have managed ARGB somehow or other. So I fortified myself with a starchy meal of beans and potatoes--carbohydrate loading is essential in programming, as the brain uses more energy than any other organ--and banged my head against it for a few more hours.
Eventually I discovered Axialis, an icon editor that can create ARGB icons and toolbar bitmaps. Supposedly Microsoft used Axialis for their apps until they finally barfed up a reasonable image editor in VS2010. How embarrassing is that? Well I'd be embarrassed, but whatever. Anyway there's a Lite version of Axialis that's free if you have VS2008 installed, so I gave that a try, and after a few hours of painful struggle, I was able to get an ARGB toolbar working in a test app. The main obstacle was that for 16x15 icons--the size WaveShop uses--all the icons have to be shifted right by one pixel. No mention of this in any documentation of course. Pretty crazy. I definitely wouldn't describe the process as painless, but on the other hand it only has to be done once. The hidden cost is that you can't use the VS2008 image editor to edit the toolbar anymore, and if you try it, the toolbar get trashed, but that's the way it goes.
Of course Axialis is no use without some icons, and naturally the Lite version doesn't come with any decent icon sets because they want you to pay money for those. But in my travels I also discovered that VS2008 ships with a big collection of ARGB icons (all the ones used in VS2008) as described
here.
So I cobbled the pieces together. To my eye this toolbar looks OK in Windows 7 and XP. I don't have Vista so I can't test that. Here's what it looks like:
