Right-aligned tab items in Win32 tab control

I am trying to create a tab-control that have the tab-buttons aligned from right-to-left, in Win32/c++. The WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL flag doesn't help me, as it mirrors the drawing completely both for the tab items and the tab page contents. The application itself handles the mirroring automatically (it's a cross platform UI solution), which is also a reason for us not to use WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL flag (we have mirroring implemented in a generic way for all UI frameworks/platforms).

One solution would be to override TCM_GETITEMRECT and TCM_HITTEST in the subclassed TabCtrls window procedure. This enables me to move the buttons allright, but the mouse events still acts on the positions that the control "knows" the buttons really are at (ie. mouseover on the first button invalidates the leftmost button - the coordinates are not mirrored).

So that seems to be a dead end for me.

Another possibility would be to insert padding before the first tab button, to push them all to the right edge. I haven't been able to figure out how to do that, though. Visual Studio sports this little dialog:

How did they put the buttons in front of the first tab page? Knowing this would enable me to solve this problem.

Update, solution: The solution to my problem is to use the built-in RTL support. For this to work, the tab control must have both the WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL and WS_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT flags. That will preserve the function of all existing drawing code while only the TabCtrl buttons are mirrored. I didn't realize that the ES_EX_NOINHERITLAYOUT flag goes on the parent (the TabCtrl), which is why I was looking for the workaround originally described.

For reference, I am still curious to have an answer to the original question, though.开发者_开发百科

If you take a look with a spy application you will see that it is not actually a normal windows tab-control but custom thing and the drawing is done by the parent window AFAIK:

Both Visual Studio and Office use a lot of custom controls, some of the features make their way into the common controls after a few years, some features stay private...