Gradient Masks

[bmw5002]

I'm writing my own text ticker/scroller type thing that only needs the handle to a static control on a dialog or wherever, and the rest is completely self contained in the class, the timers dont need windows to process their events. Anyway I want to have the left and right edges of the scroller fade. So say the background was dark blue, and the text was white. The white text would fade to blue at the edges. Now from my photoshop experience, at first I thought, black-to-white gradient as a mask. But how would I accomplish that with the GDI? At first I thought alpha-blending, but I didnt see a way to use a grayscale gradient as the guide for transparency. So then I saw the MaskBlt function. So I'm thinking create a monochrome memory bitmap with gradients on either side, then use that as the mask and a color memory bitmap with the text as the source, and the destination would be the solid background color layer. Then I would BitBlt that to the static control. So my question is, would this theoretically work? Am I going in the right direction?