I've noticed that the latest Notepad has a "retro" look & feel. It seems to strive to retaina pre-XP aesthetic. Specifically it's menuItems have no Check Margins and no Image Margins. And the status linehas traditional sunken labels. I think this is a reasonable choice for a simple tool such asnotepad, since it keeps the visual clutter to a minimum. Iwould like todo the same thing. Unfortunatelyusing the latest Visual Studio and Windows 7, I was not able to acheive the same effect. Is it possible to use Visual Studio to create a menuitem with no margin? Or to make status line labels that look like they do in the latest Notepad?

If not, I don't think it'svalid for MS GUI designers to have it both ways. Either they have to update Notepad to their current design standards, or they have to give programmers the tools to emulate the Notepad look/feel with current Visual Studio.

Thanks for any comments.

P.S. I'm not sure exactly which forum to use for this question. If I'm in the wrong one, I'd appreciate be directed to the correct one. I orginally posted this in the "Windows 7 User Interface" forum and was sent here. Thanks.

It's almost certainly the case that the newer visual style is something that needs to be opted in to, and Notepad just hasn't been updated for so long that it's using the older code still.

You might find that applying the Classic style to your application (there are some tutorials on how to "force" WPF into using a specific style regardless of the active Windows style) does the trick. Otherwise, you'll need to develop the style yourself by retemplating MenuItem and StatusBar.

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