Compaq Visual Fortran: A Guide to Creating Windows Applications
This guide supplies step-by-step training techniques for building Visual Fortran applications without the knowledge requirement of C or C++.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Compaq Visual Fortran: A Guide to Creating Windows Applications
Chapter 13: Finishing Touches
13.1 Introduction
The emphasis in this chapter is to develop techniques that will add a touch of professionalism to our applications. We will use the owner draw option to customize list and combo boxes and thus provide a degree of individualism for our applications. We will examine how to provide a tip of the day dialog box at startup. In addition, we will be using the Registry to maintain a list of recently used files for an application and display that list on the application's File menu.
13.2 Owner draw controls
One particularly important feature of the Windows environment is the degree of standardization of user interfaces for most, if not all, applications. Users have becomes familiar with a particular sequence of top-level menus, File at the beginning and Help at the end. They expect that for options such as cut, copy, or paste the respective accelerator keys will be Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, or Ctrl+V. Dialog boxes and tabbed dialog boxes are an accepted method for making choices and entering data. The left-hand button of the mouse is used for selecting, while context menus are invoked by clicking the righthand mouse button. However, the Windows environment also permits software developers to exercise control over the appearance of a control or menu item through an owner draw feature. Owner draw capabilities are available for buttons, combo boxes, list boxes, list view controls, menu items, static controls, and tab controls. However, a note of caution is also necessary. Having the ability to redefine...
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