Strictly speaking, Patrice's WinLIFT is not a
theming framework, at least not in its window frame part. Patrice's frame windows have no native decorations (a.k.a. non-client areas) at all and are effectively bare border-less client area quads with the outlines elaborately dressed in matching textures to emulate custom drawn decorations. As a result, WinLIFT is unable to skin (theme) 3rd party windows such as e.g. message boxes or common dialogs even though they belong to the same process as the app main window and its siblings/children. The window "decorations" created with WinLIFT use transparent message pump subclassing to emulate non-client area hit tests to fool Windows into reacting to the mouse events as if they were occurring over Windows native decorations.
But the overall aesthetic effect is very cool indeed. Patrice is a very talented graphics designer and an able programmer too.
WinLIFT's custom controls are however built around the Windows common controls as they are. Wherever possible, WinLIFT uses (and sometimes overrides/suppresses) the common controls' built-in ownerdraw options to skin the controls in a style common with the emulated decorations of Patrice's "frame" windows, basically pretty much like what Roland's code does in O2, PB, and C++.
