(Borland) Delphi also made creating non standard form shapes; the secret was in leveraging the win32 api, which was really easy to do in Delphi.
Here's an example: http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm
Here's an example: http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm
It was a long time ago, but IIRC I was using Visual C++ (a very nice compiler that was the first to implement the STL as written) having abandoned Borland Foundation Classes (? name ?) which was dreadful. Woeful.
MFC, the MS C++ offering for writing Windows apps was impossible to use and undocumented at the time. We subscribed to those piles of CDs that MS would send out regularly and I could only find decent documentation for the C API, not the MFC one. Weird.
I used an explicit event loop (simple for a Computer Science graduate like I was) and the C API inside my C++ programme and it worked a treat
Those were (not) the days....