Hi, I have been working with a few Win32 and MFC based applications at work and I am getting rather familiar with Windows, dialogs, common controls etc.

My question is if someone know any good easy to handle stylizing technique for windows? Say I want my application to look like steam for example. Is overriding the WM_PAINT and WM_NCPAINT procedures and handling everything myself the way to go if I want to do this in any reasonable way?

Edit: Not sure if the main forum is the right place to ask general programming questions?

Steam uses WebKit to render its interface. Basically it produces html page for it's UI, probably with some JavaScript for logic.

But yeah, if you want to draw custom stuff, WM_PAINT message is fine. Get the DC and draw on it.

Alternative approach is to use D3D or OpenGL to draw using hardware acceleration. Pretty much what Handmade Hero does. Do a loop in main that polls events and sends rendering commands to GPU. This is also what dear imgui does.

Thank you for that very fast and clear answer.