SftTabs/DLL - Tab Control
SftTabs/DLL is a DLL-based tab control for the Windows™ operating system, offering an alternative method of displaying multiple dialogs or cascading menu selections, by displaying tabs as found in a file cabinet or a notebook.
Tab Control
SftTabs/DLL offers many features; from a simple, single-row tab control to a multi-row, multi-color tab control in a notebook style.
- SftTabs/DLL Wizard
- 75 customizable tab styles
- Single or multiple
- Automatic multi-row tab layout (auto-flow)
- Different color tabs, solid or gradient-filled
- Owner-drawn (custom-rendered) tabs and tab control background
- Themes support
- Transition effects
- Background bitmaps and transparent controls
- Customizable images on each tab for regular, hot and disabled tabs using bitmaps, icons, image lists, GDI+ images, checkboxes, radiobuttons.
- Hidden tabs
- Enabled/disabled tabs
- Single or multiline tab labels
- Keyboard mnemonics (accelerator keys) on tab labels
- Selectable tab label text alignment (left, right, center)
- Built-in Minimize, Restore, Close buttons
- Optional close button on each tab
- Wizard-style dialogs
- Tabbed dialogs and tabbed windows
- Tab reordering
- Tab drag & drop
- Up to 32
- Up to 256 tabs per tab control
- Multiple tab styles
- Tab colors can change based on tab status
- Fixed or variable width tabs
- Tab control with or without
- ToolTips
- Flyby highlighting
- Ellipses for truncated tab text
- Scrollable tabs
- User-customizable bitmaps
- Reduced menu complexity by using tab controls
- Support for C and C++ (MFC) using Visual Studio
- Support for Windows 10 and above, 64-bit, 32-bit and ARM64 applications
- Complete implementation, not a sub/superclassed Windows control
- Windows dark mode support, tracking the Windows "Choose your mode" setting automatically
- Windows High Contrast accessibility support
- Per-Monitor v2 DPI awareness
- Built-in UI Automation provider and live-region announcements for screen readers (Narrator, NVDA, JAWS)
- Documentation for AI coding assistants - an offline, full-text API reference formatted for large-language-model grounding, plus an AGENTS.md pointer file, so assistants such as Claude, GitHub Copilot and Cursor can answer questions and generate code against the complete API
SftTabs/DLL Wizard Application
The SftTabs/DLL Wizard allows you to design and test a tab control without any programming. Tab labels, the number of , tab colors, icon and bitmap locations are just a few of the items you can customize. Once you are satisfied with your tab control look, the SftTabs/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 tab control access, tabbed dialogs and tabbed windows is supplied. Any application that you develop can use SftTabs/DLL royalty-free (some restrictions apply), as long as only the DLL is shipped with your application.
Languages Supported
SftTabs/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, SftTabs/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 SftTabs/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 SftTabs/DLL.
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