Showing and Hiding a Window

Hi,
I was writing a program an interface kind of like windows installer wizards or other wizards. For example, I have a main screen, you choose an option and click next. The new window is exactly the same size, and the buttons in the corner are still there. However, new stuff appears in the middle. My problem is, I didn't want to put all the different buttons on one dialog and just show and hide them depending on what I'm doing. So I decided to have several different dialogs. Once I tried it out, though, I found out if you moved the new dialog, you could still see the main screen behind it. So I thought I would try to use

Code:

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ShowWindow(hwnd, SW_HIDE);

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and it works, but the little bar containing the program name at the bottom of the screen disappears! Does anyone know how to keep this from happening or know a better way? Thanks.

This is a bad hack I guess but can't you show a fake window that has a dialog off-screen or something when you hide your main window?

Can you possilby use SetLayeredWindowAttributes and make your window totally transparent? That is, the window is there but you just can't see it.

Just use Child Windows. What you do is place all controls/buttons of a group into a child window and then just show/hide that child window when you want to show/hide the group of controls. Its a hell of a lot easier than messing with ShowWindow. Believe me, you don't want to start messing around with SW_HIDE. I used it to get my apps to minimize to tray, but along with that it did some other nasty things when trying to redraw the window and its taskbar icon (i.e. I had to put a lot of hack-ish code in some obscure places just to get my window and all of its owned windows to redraw/redisplay properly after a call to ShowWindow(SW_HIDE)).

So what should I use with the child windows, EnableWindow?

Ironically, ShowWindow(hwndChild, SW_HIDE) (though SW_HIDE does not cause the same evilness with child windows as it does with displayed windows). You can use EnableWindow in addition to that if you're extra paranoid (like me), but generally hiding the child window should be enough.

So you would set it up like this:

Code:

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INT_PTR
MainWindowProc(...)
{
    WM_CREATE:
      // create child window class
      WNDCLASSEX wcxChild;
      // fill out its fields
      ...
      wcxChild.lpszClassName = Child1Name;  // give child1 class a name
      wcxChild.lpfnWndProc = Child1Proc; // give it a window function
      RegisterClassex(&wcxChild); // register it
      // create child window 1
      CreateWindow(WS_EX_CONTROLPARENT, child1Name,..., WS_CHILD | WS_VISIBLE, x, y, w, h, hwndParent, child1ID, hInst, ...);

      wcxChild.lpszClassName = Child2Name;  // give child2 class a name
      wcxChild.lpfnWndProc = Child2Proc;  // give it a window function
      RegisterClassex(&wcxChild);  // register it
      CreateWindow(..., child2Name, ... child2ID,...);

      // repeat these steps (name, func, register, create) for each child window
      ...

      WM_NCDESTROY:
        // after this window is destroyed, if you no longer
        // need the child windows, unregister their classes to free memory
        // (no need to do this if your entire app is exiting though)
        Unregister(Child1Name, hInst);
        Unregister(Child2Name, hInst);
        ...
}

INT_PTR
Child1Proc(...)
{
    WM_CREATE:
        // create child1 controls here
        ....
    WM_COMMAND:
      // hande child1 messages here (or you can pass them onto parent)
}


INT_PTR
Child2Proc(...)
{
    WM_CREATE:
        // create child2 controls here
        ....
    WM_COMMAND:
      // hande child2 messages here (or you can pass them onto parent)
}

...

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Is it possible to do this in a resource file, instead of at runtime (like you have above)?