What's the best way to get around the lack of transparency in WixUI background images?
wix
Solution
From the WiX tutorial UI revisited chapter:
And a common complaint: no, the checkbox can't have a transparent background. If you have a bitmap in the background, it will be ugly, just like in our example above. The only workaround is to reduce the width of the checkbox to the actual box itself and to place an additional static text (these can be made transparent) adjacent to it.
This workaround has a side effect, although: in order to turn the checkbox on and off, you should click exactly in the box area, not the text. Comparing to the rest of Windows Installer UI limitations, it's slightly annoying :-)
Problem
I'm using the Feature Tree UI, with a couple of custom dialogs. One of these has checkboxes on it. These checkboxes cannot be made to have transparent backgrounds, meaning I've had to colour in my background image the default background colour so that there aren't visible boxes around the checkboxes. However, different versions of Windows have different default colouring! If I match the colour on Windows 7, it looks bad on XP, etc. Since the background images are Bitmaps, I can't make them transparent. What can I do to get around this problem?