SftButton/DLL - Button Control
SftButton/DLL is a DLL-based button control for the Windows™ operating system, offering a fully customizable replacement for the standard Windows push button, check box and dropdown button.
Button Control
SftButton/DLL offers many features; from a simple, text-only push button to a fully themed, gradient-filled button with multi-state images and an attached dropdown arrow.
- SftButton/DLL Wizard for designing button controls and generating run-time code
- Push button, toggle (check box) and dropdown button behavior
- Three border styles (thin, standard, single-pixel)
- Customizable background with solid color or gradient fill (per-state: normal, focus, hover)
- Two overlaid image layers plus independent background pictures, each with per-state images for normal, hover, pressed and disabled
- Bitmap, icon, image list and GDI+ image support through the SFT_PICTURE model
- Rich single-line or multi-line text through the SFT_TEXT model, with per-state text colors (normal, pressed, disabled) on SFTBUTTON_CONTROL
- Selectable text alignment (left, right, center) with vertical positioning
- Themes support (full, or theme-without-text)
- Optional dropdown arrow in four styles (standard, narrow 1/2/3, wide 1) with its own click and double-click notifications
- Configurable hit-testing regions (entire control, exact image + text bounds, images only, text only)
- Hover detection (control level or pixel-exact)
- Press animation ("bounce") with per-control override
- Anchor-based auto-sizing to nine window positions (corners, edges, center)
- Focus ring control and default-button styling
- Right-click, middle-click and double-click notifications in addition to the standard click
- Complete implementation, not a sub/superclassed Windows control
- Support for C and C++ (MFC) using Visual Studio
- Support for Windows 10 and above, 64-bit, 32-bit and ARM64 applications
- Windows dark mode support, tracking the Windows "Choose your mode" setting automatically
- Windows High Contrast accessibility support
- Per-Monitor v2 DPI awareness with image and pixel scaling
- Built-in UI Automation provider for screen readers (Narrator, NVDA, JAWS)
SftButton/DLL Wizard Application
The SftButton/DLL Wizard allows you to design and test a button control without any programming. Button text, colors, borders, the dropdown arrow, images and other attributes are just a few of the items you can customize. Once you are satisfied with your button control look, the SftButton/DLL Wizard can even generate the required run-time code for C or C++ with MFC. So your programming effort is kept to a minimum.
Source Code
The source code for the MFC classes for button control access is supplied. Any application that you develop can use SftButton/DLL royalty-free (some restrictions apply), as long as only the DLL is shipped with your application.
Languages Supported
SftButton/DLL supports C, C++ and other languages when using the standard SendMessage Windows API. The DLLs can be called using the definitions provided in the supplied header file. In addition, SftButton/DLL is shipped with class definitions which support the Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC).
Environments Supported
- 64-bit support when running Windows 10 and above with Intel 64-bit processors
- 32-bit applications on Windows 10 and above
- ARM64 support when running Windows 11 and above on ARM64 processors
UNICODE support is available for all platforms.
The product supports the same easy to use API on all platforms.
Royalties
Any application that you develop can use SftButton/DLL royalty-free in run-time only mode; design-time features are not available. Each user (developer) who needs access to any portion of the product must license a copy of SftButton/DLL.
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