Okay so the thing you are trying to make is a Radial Control or sometimes called a radial gauge (although gauge tends to imply display only) Can't you just push out the messages as standard scrollbar messages using PostMessage with the handle being your parent window. I mean in standard native Win32 I would do this if I wanted to FAKE a WM_VSCROLL or WM_HSCROLL lets assume your dial is handle is hwnd and a position pos. HWND myParent = GetParent(hwnd); // Standard API call to get a windows parent PostMessage(myParent, WM_VSCROLL, MAKEWPARAM(SB_THUMBPOSITION, pos), (LPARAM)hwnd); // Standard scrollbar fake message posted to my parent As we are faking it I wouldn't use SendMessage as it might go re-entrant (you post off to the dialog and it posts back and around in circles it would go). I can't see how MFC could get that wrong as there message pump is still using PeekMessage from the standard windows queue. In vino veritas