Does the Win32 API expose any of the facilities that are used by Windows to draw the native controls as they appear by default?
Say my application wants to display a non-interactive preview/mockup of a UI, like the VS dialog editor does for example. It would be preferable if I could just specify rectangle coordinates and have Windows draw the button for me instead of trying to fake the appearance of the skin with lots of tiny bitmaps.
An obvious workaround would be to simply create "real" controls and not implement any behavior for them. The downside is that they are unnecessarily interactive and waste resources. It would be better if I could just paint the UI to the window or a bitmap once and be done with it.