Visual Basic Concepts

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.