Textured tab page backgrounds are perhaps the most glaring omission from the theme support in .NET 1.0 and 1.1.

Although .NET 2.0 adds support for textured backgrounds, one control in particular does not draw transparently: the read-only TextBox control. You can see an example of why you would want this behavior if you open the property pages for a file in Windows Explorer. The filename is displayed in a textbox which, unlike a label, supports scrolling (perfect for those really, really long file names).

Furthermore, VisualStyles uses an in-memory double buffer to render tab pages and their children, eliminating flicker, and improving rendering performance over .NET 2.0 by as much as 20%. And VisualStyles handles complicated situations with ease—drag-resizing nested tab controls, user controls and group boxes are no sweat.

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