Greg,
I uploaded the header to the José Roca's forum already there:
http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smfforum/index.php?topic=1993.msg9722;topicseen#msg9722It was very interesting to see the different file sizes that each programming language produced!
While using different languages, including managed C#, i am always back to the core flat API as soon as i want to take control of everything, mostly because, like yourself, i have also designed my own skin engine.
Low level programming is the only way to create efficient code for that purpose. WinLIFT was my first skinengine (i wrote it in 1997). However since VISTA, i was forced to take another approach to design the interface of my new applications, to let them work together with DWM in full composited mode.
If you want to see what i come with, then give a look
heremake sure also to look at the fantastic interface of "
Panther" that is
100% OpenGL coding by Ryan Cross.
Note: My GDImage graphic library allows the mixing of GDI32, GDIPLUS and OpenGL altogether.
you can try one of my lattest demo showing this in context
there (you must have a graphic card that is 100% OpenGL 2.0+ compatible to run the
Image3D demo)
(The .zsk file is the counterpart of your .xml file)
When you see the size and speed of the resulting EXE, then you can understand the supperiority of the old SDK programming style hover the current approach of managed code that requires the bloated DotNET runtime