.NET ListView and Windows 7

Question

Maybe I'm missing something, but... The ListView control in Windows 7 displays a highlight around selected items that looks like a 3D blue translucent rectangle (I'm not talking about the selection rectangle, but the rectangle around the actual selected items). It even shows a lighter rectangle when hovering over items.

However, when I use the ListView in WinForms (even when double-buffered), the selected items just have a plain blue background (and no hover background) which looks much less professional than, say, the list in Explorer.

Does anyone know what secret API function I should call to make the .NET ListView look in line with the rest of the OS?

For example, here is one of my applications written in C++, using a standard ListView control in Windows 7: (notice the highlight and hover rectangle)

And here is a rewrite of that application in C# with WinForms: (notice the crude highlight and no hover)

Answer 1

OK, I totally figured it out, and this may help others who are bothered by this issue.

I began by noticing that the ListView control in C++Builder looks "correct" under Windows 7, so I looked in the source code for the VCL to see what kind of magic they're doing to make the ListView look like the list control in Windows Explorer. I stumbled on one line of code that looked promising:

SetWindowTheme(Handle, 'explorer', nil);

From the SDK documentation, this function "Causes a window to use a different set of visual style information than its class normally uses."

So, I tried invoking this function on my WinForms ListView control:

[DllImport("uxtheme.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
public static extern int SetWindowTheme(IntPtr hWnd, String pszSubAppName, String pszSubIdList);


SetWindowTheme(myListView.Handle, "explorer", null);

...and, by god, it worked! The ListView finally looks like it belongs with the rest of the OS! Thanks, Borland Inprise Embarcadero! You really are good for something!