Vertical Text in a Tab Control Will Not Display

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I have a program which has a tab control in a Windows form. This control uses the <code>Alignment = Left</code> property to place the tabs vertically at the left edge of the control. When installed on a number of XP computers (mostly by Dell, with a few Lenovo), the vertical text displays correctly on some, but is missing on others. I am using VB2005.

Has anyone seen this behavior before? Any ideas regarding the cause?

Thank you.

Posted 2-Feb-11 12:43pm

Jalapeno Bob

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2 solutions

Solution 1

I'm not sure if this will help, but at this link, I found this.

The VB2005 app is themed and the VB6 one is not, am I right?
Timo Kunze posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 5:11 PM

The VB2005 app is themed and the VB6 one is not, am I right?
On Windows XP, vertical tab alignment isn't supported if the control is
themed.

Posted 2-Feb-11 14:35pm

fjdiewornncalwe

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Jalapeno Bob 3-Feb-11 17:35pm

This might explain why it does NOT display on some, but why does the text display correctly on other XP machines?

fjdiewornncalwe 4-Feb-11 17:28pm

It could mean that some machines have a theme applied at the OS level, and others do not.

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Jalapeno Bob · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-14T12:01:00

Based on the information supplied by Marcus Kramer, I found the following description of a "feature" regarding the Tab Control Alignment attribute in the MSDN library:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.tabcontrol.alignment.aspx[^]

This lead me to a Windows API call which selects and disables (by selecting no theme) themes for controls: SetWindowTheme Function(^)

I found that this solution must be applied to each afflicted tab control:

VB

Public Class Form1

    Public Declare Unicode Function SetWindowTheme Lib "uxtheme.dll" (ByVal hWnd As IntPtr, _
        ByVal pszSubAppName As String, ByVal pszSubIdList As String) As Integer

    Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
            ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
        Dim sb As String = String.Empty
        Dim v As String = String.Empty

        If Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major = 5 And _
                Environment.OSVersion.Version.Minor = 1 Then
            SetWindowTheme(Me.TabControl1.Handle, " ", " ")
        End If

    End Sub     ' Form1_Load