Hello! I've been trying to figure out how to change a tab control's background color; it doesn't have any messages that can be sent to it to change it and so the background with the required color needs to be drawn manually; I found some solutions on the Internet (like this one: http://web.archive.org/web/20190119111408/http://www.glennslayden.com/code/win32/tab-control-background-brush) but they seem complicated and I'm not good enough with C to translate them into asm; I was wondering if there's an easier way to do this, by changing the default background color or something similar? I tried SetSysColors with COLOR_BTNFACE (and some other ones) but it changed the color for the entire system and the tab control wasn't even affected...

The example you found uses subclassing.

They replace the standard function of the created window with their own. In your function, you process only those messages that you need, and call the old function to process the rest.

In the found example, only the WM_PAINT message is processed, drawing elements with an arbitrary background, and all other messages go to the old function for processing.

This looks like a good answer:
http://www.equestionanswers.com/vcpp/background-color-edit-static.php
...but no tab control.

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/44bf30c8-ca7b-483f-9c8f-8aafcffd389e/picking-up-the-background-of-a-tab-control-in-a-dialog?forum=vcgeneral

Owner-drawn tabs seem overkill just to change the color. (AHK example)

Looking at Notepad++ source code it looks like subclassing and painting the background by handling WM_ERASEBKGND might be sufficient.

Handling WM_ERASEBKGND definitely doesn't work - in fact the WM_PAINT for the tab control completely covers the client area, so anything done in WM_ERASEBKGND is over-written.

I did log the messages for the tab control and there is no WM_CTLCOLOR* type message or internal "hacky-way" to set the color that I could see.

Looks like owner-drawn control is the only way.

I tried replacing just WM_ERASEBKGND at first, but then the new background only occasionally appeared after I dragged the window off screen (also the tabs themselves stopped working); I tried to do something similar to the posted example by first calling the original WM_PAINT then recolouring the background, but it didn't work either... Originally I was trying to make the background have the default form color, and apparently just setting the TCS_OWNERDRAWFIXED style makes the background have that exact color; now all I need to do is put static text controls where the tabs are supposed to be (their layout and boundaries are still drawn). Thanks a lot, bitRAKE and macomics!