Drawing a custom button with hot or pressed state

Question

I've created a custom button control. Basically one button-rectangle, but with two areas inside the rectangle that have a different behavior. For that reason I want to draw the hot and pressed state ONLY for the specific areas, not the hole button.

My current approach is drawing the basic-button using ButtonRenderer.DrawButton(...) with an emtpy text, draw the hot or pressed state if required and finally drawing the text. So far so good, but how do I get the (gradient) colors for the hot/pressed state?

I've tried SystemColors, KnownColors and VisualStyleRenderer.GetColor(ColorProperty.XYZ) but none of them seems to match? How can I read those colors from the host system?

EDIT:
Sample picture below:

I want the colors of both the hot and the pressed button-state - (light) blue in case of this win7 screenshot. If you zoom in you can see that a slight color gradient in both the upper and the lower half is used.

The last button shows what I want to accomplish.

Sure, I could extract the colors from the screenshots and hardcode them or use images like suggested, but that would work only for this specific system, wouldn't it?

Answer 1

Thanks for your answers, Jimi.

According to the accepted answer of your linked SO-question I checked ButtonBaseAdapter and ButtonStandardAdapter. As you also mentioned, ButtonRenderer.DrawButton calls VisualStyleRenderer.DrawBackground which calls the native API UxTheme.DrawThemedBackground to draw the button - the color determination happens inside. This native API call also draws the button-border and thats the reason why I can't use it.

But I was able to solve my Problem, an unusual way, but it works.

I render both relevant states (hot and pressed) to a bitmap and extract the colors using .GetPixel. In OnPaint I create LinearGradientBrush-instances from the extracted colors and draw the hot/pressed effect over the specific areas of the normal button.

It's not the exact same behavior like a normal button (for both states the border color also changes), but I think it would look really strange if I change the border color only for a part of the button (where the hot/pressed effect is displayed) to match the normal button behavior...

If no other answers or solutions come up I'll mark this post in a few days as an answer...