Introduction

TabStrip is an ActiveX control that wraps the SysTabControl32 window class. It is optimized for Visual Basic 6.0, but should also work in any other environment that supports COM controls.

Basics

The control superclasses the native tabstrip window class of Windows: SysTabControl32. Although I tried to wrap all features of this window class (status: Windows 2008 R2), some things may be missing. In these cases you usually may use the Win32 API and handle the control as a native tabstrip window. One of my goals was it to create a tabstrip control that may be controlled via API as well as via the classes that I implemented.

Requirements

TabStrip Unicode runs on the following operating systems:

Windows XP (SP3 or later)
Windows Server 2003 (SP2 or later)
Windows Vista (SP2 or later)
Windows Server 2008 (SP2 or later)
Windows 7 (SP1 or later)
Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP1 or later)
Systems supported by Wine (Wine is a Win32 subsystem for alternative operating systems) - limited support
ReactOS (a free Windows XP clone) - limited support

Some features have additional requirements which are mentioned in the affected feature's documentation.
Limited support means, that I won't invest much work to support those systems. If a feature works on a system marked with "limited support" - fine; if it does not and it's easy to fix, I'll fix it, but if it's difficult to fix, I probably won't fix it. Also I will test the control much less on those systems.

Support

Although there's no entitlement to support, you've good chances to get help if you either post to the forums or send me a mail.
Bugs and feature requests should be entered into the bug tracking system.

TabStrip License

      TabStrip
      ~~~~~~~~
      License for use and distribution
      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

     TabStrip Copyright (C) 2006-2012 Timo Kunze

     This library comes for free. You can redistribute it, but
      not modify it. If you use this library in your program,
      it would be nice (but isn't necessary) to mention its
      author Timo Kunze together with a link to his website
      http://www.timosoft-software.de in your software's
      About dialog.

     This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
      but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
      MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to:

Wine Headquarters, because Wine helped me a lot on understanding how Windows is working.
Microsoft, for ATL, WTL and Visual Studio - great libraries and a great IDE
Geoff Chappell, for his website about undocumented Win32 API stuff.
Igor Tandetnik, for his great help on learning ATL and WTL
Dimitri van Heesch, for Doxygen
Nikos Bozinis, for his awesome help with the Vista drag'n'drop stuff.
Christian Lütgens, for his great work as beta-tester and for his help when I needed a 2nd opinion on some decisions.
All donators
For great music: Amon Amarth, Heaven Shall Burn, Arch Enemy, Deadlock, Draconian, Ensiferum, Epica, Sirenia, Tristania, Nightwish (with Tarja), Delain, Lacuna Coil, Battlelore, Volbeat, Dimmu Borgir, Guns N' Roses

FAQ

1. Why is the Font property ignored?
It isn't. My controls have a property UseSystemFont which defaults to True. This property tells the control to use the system font rather than the font set by the Font property.
Why is this property's default True? Well, if I set system wide settings (like fonts) I expect all applications to follow them. Unfortunately ignoring system wide settings seems to be trendy, so see my decision as an educational measure.

2. Why is event xyz not fired?
Firing an event is relative time-consuming, even if the event isn't handled by the application at all. Therefore I implemented a DisabledEvents property which can be used to deactivate certain events.
By default many events are deactivated.

3. The control doesn't seem to have full Unicode support if it is used in Visual Basic 6. Why?
The forms, that Visual Basic 6 is creating, are ANSI windows. Therefore they force the control's underlying native tabstrip window class to use ANSI messages when communicating with the form. This breaks Unicode support in some situations. To work around this problem, the WM_NOTIFYFORMAT message needs to be reflected back to the control.
In Visual Basic, you have to subclass the control's container window and send WM_NOTIFYFORMAT back to the window that it was sent for. In C++, message reflection works similar. The sample projects teach you how to reflect the message.

4. The control has drawing glitches if it sits inside a Visual Basic 6 Frame control and the app is themed!
The intrinsic Frame control of Visual Basic 6.0 doesn't work well with Windows themes. The drawing glitches you see are more a problem of the Frame control than of the TabStrip control. So far I have not found any work-around for the drawing glitches, that doesn't come with other side-effects like extreme flicker on control resize.
Until a better solution is found, you should make sure that you always place the TabStrip control inside a container which has its own device context (it should have a hDC property then).
Adequate replacements for the Visual Basic 6 Frame control are the Frame control from my ButtonControls library and the PictureBox control, depending on your requirements.