Opening the Window - Creating a dialog!

Hello everyone!

In this article we will focus on how to easily create a basic layout for a window. It is using dialog templates stored as a resource inside an executable or DLL. It is often a lot of work to create a layout for a window just using the

CreateWindow

function is pretty a mess also because you cannot view directly how it will finally look. Having a WYSIWYG editor would be way easier! Interestingly there exists a simple way to code using such an editor. In order to achieve that you need to create the window from a resource which is embedded into the executable. This resource contains text that describes how the window should be led out. And the best thing is: There are free and paid editors for those files. Ill describe both, one with a free and one with a paid editor.

Users with a paid version of Visual Studio 
To add a dialog resource you do the following



This will show up a new dialog window that lets us select which type of resource to add. Obviously we will create a dialog resource!



The simplest is to just use Dialog. It will create a nice window and show it up in a new UI. There you can freely add controls, change properties of the window or the controls added.

When you are finished designing the window you can return to your project and you see that there are 2 new files. One is the resource.h which defines symbolic names for the resources and ProjectName.rc. This is the file which describes how resources are called inside the executable.


Users which have no paid version of Visual Studio 
There are free editors available to create a resource script (.rc) file and edit the contents. I think the best one is ResEdit. Its freely available and pretty easy to handle. When finished you will have a .rc file with a dialog resource included. You can drag that .rc file into your project and compile. It will be included into the executable. Thats it!

From now on everything is the same for the paid and the free version. 

Simply displaying the dialog is a very easy task. Windows offers us a function called DialogBox. This function expects parameters that specify where to find the dialog resource. Then it shows the dialog and returns when the dialog is destroyed. As usual also dialogs send messages to the application telling it that something interesting may have happened. So the code to show our dialog is pretty simple:

#include <Windows.h>
#include "resource.h" // users with ResEdit do not need that because they dont have it

// make sure visual styles are enabled
#pragma comment(linker, "/manifestdependency:\"type='win32' name='Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls' version='6.0.0.0' processorArchitecture='*' publicKeyToken='6595b64144ccf1df' language='*'\"")

BOOL WINAPI DialogProc(HWND hWindow, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam)
{
 switch(uMsg)
 {
 case WM_CLOSE:
  EndDialog(hWindow, 0);
  DestroyWindow(hWindow);
  return TRUE;
 case WM_INITDIALOG:
  return TRUE;
 }

 return FALSE;
}

int main()
{
 // Users with ResEdit specify "Name of the resource" for the second param
 DialogBox(GetModuleHandle(NULL), MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDD_DIALOG1), GetDesktopWindow(), DialogProc);
}

The most complex is the DialogProc function. In opposite to regular message handlers it only returns a boolean. This boolean tells the operation system if our application has handled the message or not. The two messages that are important are WM_CLOSE and WM_INITDIALOG. The first message is sent when the user presses the close icon, the latter is sent when the dialog is loaded. In WM_INITDIALOG the return value indicates if the keyboard focus should be set to the control the operating system has chosen or not. This actually the recommended way.

In WM_CLOSE we first end the dialog using EndDialog and then destroy the window using DestroyWindow. The second parameter of EndDialog will be the value that DialogBox will return!

Thats it, we have made a nice window without much code!

Next step: here

Thanks for reading and greetings
Yanick