Author: Jonas Bilinkevicius

I have a good reason why I cannot use forms. So as an alternative I'm using two 
panels to mimic a simple form, i.e. with no windows icons (close, minimize etc.). 
One is aligned to the top to pose like the window title bar and the other to 
client. I want to paint the top panel like a typical title bar. How can I do this?

Answer:

There is an API function named DrawCaption, you can use it to draw the caption bar. 
Drop a client-aligned TPaintbox on your fake caption panel and do the drawing in 
the paintboxes OnPaint handler.
1   
2   procedure TPLabBaseChildform.CaptionPaint(Sender: TObject);
3   const
4     activeFlags: array[Boolean] of DWORD = (0, DC_ACTIVE);
5   begin
6     with Sender as TPaintbox do
7       DrawCaption(self.handle, canvas.handle, clientrect, activeFlags[FActive] or
8         DC_TEXT or DC_GRADIENT);
9   end;


To draw other elements as well (beside the icon, which DrawCaption can handle) you use DrawFrameControl instead.