TabControl.DrawItem not firing on user painted TabControl

Question

Hey, I've been trying to paint my own TabControl to get rid of the 3D Shadow but I am not having much success. The DrawItem event isn't firing at the moment. Do I have to shoot it myself? How do I do that?

Code:

namespace NCPad
{
    public partial class NCE_TabControl : TabControl
    {
        Rectangle TabBoundary;
        RectangleF TabTextBoundary;

        public NCE_TabControl()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.UserPaint | ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint | ControlStyles.DoubleBuffer, true);
            this.DrawMode = TabDrawMode.OwnerDrawFixed;
            this.Paint += new PaintEventHandler(this.OnPaint);
            this.DrawItem += new DrawItemEventHandler(this.OnDrawItem);
        }

        protected void OnPaint(object sender, PaintEventArgs e)
        {
            Graphics g = e.Graphics;
            g.FillRectangle(new SolidBrush(Color.Red), e.ClipRectangle);
        }

        protected void OnDrawItem(object sender, DrawItemEventArgs e)
        {
            Graphics g = e.Graphics;
            g.FillRectangle(new SolidBrush(Color.Blue), this.TabBoundary);
            MessageBox.Show("hi");
        }

        protected override void OnLayout(LayoutEventArgs levent)
        {
            base.OnLayout(levent);

            this.TabBoundary = this.GetTabRect(0);
            this.TabTextBoundary = (RectangleF)this.GetTabRect(0);
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

One simple way is to change the TabControl's Appearance property to either Buttons or FlatButtons and set the DrawMode badk to Normal.