Starting with Windows XP, M$ introduced the concept of a cue banner in Edit controls. Good and useful idea, badly implemented.
First of all, the cue banner - enabled by sending the message EM_SETCUEBANNER to the respective control - does not take into account various visual styles, resulting in the text being cut off to the left in some setups (see screenshot, second image).
Second - and more importantly - a bug prevents the cue banner from being displayed on an XP system that has the Right-To-Left support/font package installed.
Third issue is that cue text font color/attributes can't be set at all in the original implementation.
Fourth issue is that the 'persistent mode' just doesn't appear to work (that is, show cue text even when control is focused but no text was input).
Fifth - and I know you'll hate me for this : we 9x users get no love!
Then, ComboBox cue banner was added to Vista through CB_SETCUEBANNER. But XP users got no love this time.
Well, no mas ! (as Bevery Hills Chihuaua used to say )
I present you with CueBanner - the function that can add cue banners duplicating same font family/size/weight as the control, with or without shadow/blur, to virtually any type of control*, in any version of Windows ranging from Windows 98 to… oh well, that's for you guys to test and report back.
I'd like to thank Helgef for his kindness in testing and reporting issues with this function under an x64 system (which I do not have access to). Without his help I would've published a buggy script. The screenshot below was sent by him for first public version. Thank you very much, Helgef! Now, there's not much to say about this function other than the comments in the code can offer. The code probably looks messy because it uses the old basic syntax - required for compatibility with 98/98SE/ME systems - and because I'm not a real programmer, but who cares as long as it works.
Windows 98SE or ME users
Unicode is now fully working in Win9x since v2.5.
That being said, here's the function, complete with any additional dependencies and an example script: Older version(s) can be found at my repository in CueBanner, seeing that board's upload count is limited.
Enjoy!
* The function has only been tested on Edit, DropDownList, ComboBox, Static, Button, Radio, Checkbox type of controls so far; any further reports with other control types would be welcome.