Well said Jim! Simon: Alan Cooper has a couple of books that may be a good "non-technical" way to assist your design decisions. "The Essentials of User Interface Design" and "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". Microsoft Press has a couple but the only one I see in front of me is "Windows User Experience" which tries to instill some standards, which of course goes against a lot of what Mr. Cooper tries to encourage. Well that's not entirely true, Mr. Cooper just doesn't like the dumb standards that don't fit well with the 'user-first' formula. Another good read is "Developing User Interfaces for Windows". Happy Reading and let me know if you need an Interface Engineer :rolleyes: Byron

I'd like to get some feedback from you guys about the best/proper way to use bitmasks. I've seen them used in several ways, the most common I think is to do something like #define BLAH 0x0001 So I was wondering what is the proper way to use them. I've seen people use decimal number, hex numbers, ascending, decending, short, long and the list goes on and on. So let me know what you guys think is a good strong coding practice to get into the habit of. Thanks!

I really liked Joseph M. Newcomer's article "Message Management" and since then I have been using registered messages. It's only slightly more work but it seems to give me a little more assurance than WM_APP+ or WM_USER+ I have to admit that I have not, in recent memory, experienced any sort of message collision/confusion with WM_APP+ but I don't really use than many user-defined messages in my apps. Mr. Mewcomer seemed to have some solid reasons to his methods and I can't think of a good reason not to follow his lead :) so that's my answer. Does anyone know if there is a limit to the number of UDM's you can register? Byro

Erik, Thanks for your response. I have CEdit subclassed already and I can trap the WM_COPY/CUT/PASTE messages there if I needed to in ::WindowProc. But I want to disable the menu items in the first place. In a nutshell what I am trying to do is have a custom 'read-only' state in the edit control. So I would like to be able to disable the Cut/Delete/Paste items of the default CEdit context menu when my control is 'read-only'. That way the user doesn't even have the option of selecting it. The only thing I can think of is to create my own pop-up menu and look for a right click or that other windows key. Which is do-able, but I'd rather just be able to enable/disable the default context menu items at will. Any ideas? Byron

well the subject says it all. I need to be able to enable/disable/hook the cut/copy/paste commands from the default CEdit control context menu. thanks ahead of time for pointing me in the right direction. byron