GradientFill and a memory DC with a viewport

I’m working on a “carousel” control similar to the one you can find in the Yahoo Go! 2.0 application. This thing showed up in my HTC S620 WM6 upgrade and the control is very cool, so I decided to write my own implementation of it in C++ using WTL 8.0. The scrolling animation is achieved by painting to a memory DC and then blitting it to the screen. All went smoothly until I decided that the carousel background would look so much nicer with a gradient, making the center item stand out in a lighter background.

WTL 8.0 does a lot for you and I found myself having more work creating the icons for the sample than actually implementing the code... I started by using the CMemoryDC class which worked beautifully until I used GradientFill. All other GDI functions work correctly, but the gradient refused to appear correctly or at all. Interestingly, when the carousel strip was set at the top of the client window it would paint correctly, but would fail at the bottom.

Looking at CMemoryDC's source code I found that the constructor sets a viewport origin in order to cope with any rectangle. When setting the carousel strip at the top, the gradient would show up because the viewport origin would match the child window's (0,0), but fail when set to the bottom because the viewport origin would be different.

I ended up by using a slightly modified version of CMemoryDC, by removing the SetViewportOrg call on the constructor and zeroing the source bitmap coordinates at the destructor's BitBlt call. The carousel now works correctly on all four window edges (top, bottom, left and right).

Presently the carousel is implemented as a child view window but I'm looking at ways to make it work as a toolbar.