Thanks, it's a good start, however I don't want only the tab labels to be custom drawn but also the entire edges around the control. The DrawItem event is only received for each tab as far as I can see... /Bjorn

From your previous post, you're going about this the wrong way. Introducing a second application for such a small operation will just make your application that much more difficult to support. You haven't made drag and drop easier by creating a second application, only more difficult. Check into that article I replied to your previous post and you'll be able to put together a modal form that itself can host multiple forms where you can then do what you were talking about. RageInTheMachine9532 "...a pungent, ghastly, stinky piece of cheese!" -- The Roaming Gnome

what do you guys think about creating another standalone application which I start and hide at startup of my application, and then send a message to it telling it to display and go topmost when i open my modal dialog box? And then define some custom messages to handle the interaction? All I want to drag and drop is some simple text strings so should not be a problem between different applications... please give an opinion of you think its a stupid /hard to realize/other idea.

I think it's ASCII. That's what a lpstr is, isn't it ? Did you think to run it and see ? Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++

So if I want to be sure and in the end come out with a measure of the number of bytes (since I use this in conjunction with a filename buffer for a custom multiselect file dialog) what can I do? Is there some other way of finding out the length in bytes of a string? In a compile-mode independant manner? I mean it seems clear that the object itself contains a buffer so it should also internally have a count of the bytes. Is this hidden? Because this behaviour from GetLength() seems to be a bit confusing... (or maybe I am what is confused?)

Path will be valid as long as it has the valid characters, which u can check for. xacc-ide 0.0.15 now with C#, MSIL, C, XML, ASP.NET, Nemerle, MyXaml and HLSL coloring - Screenshots

You should be doing the lengthy processor intensive work in a thread seperate from the main gui thread. Start a worker thread and do your lengthy work there. Update the progress bar's values from the worker thread. The main window thread will then keep your bar painted properly.

You may find this article http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/polycontainer.asp[^] of help. If you need to call these functions in specific class instances then you will need to hang on to their 'this' pointer or use something like delegates: http://www.codeproject.com/cpp/FastDelegate.asp[^] I can't see why you'd want to store function pointers in a map though! Neville Franks, Author of ED for Windows www.getsoft.com and coming soon: Surfulater www.surfulater.com

UserControl should repond by default to key strokes. For a custom control, you mite need to enable: SetStyle(ControlStyles.Selectable, true); top secret xacc-ide 0.0.1

A UserControl is for composite controls (i.e., controls made-up of other controls). It's not really a good base class in this case, and is designed to receive notifications from its children. There are lots of articles here on CodeProject about custom slider controls. I recommend taking a look at some to get some better ideas (without going into a long, unnecessary discussion here) to help you along. http://www.codeproject.com/info/search.asp?cats=3&cats=5&searchkw=slider[^] Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles

In addition to what CWIZO and John said, you can interop shdocvw.dll by using tlbimp.exe or VS.NET (add a COM reference to your project for the Microsoft Web Browser library) and use the InternetExplorer class to load a file. This will create a new instance of IE or use an existing instance (the fore-most instance, IIRC) to display the HTML (or whatever IE-handled file). Using Process.Start with a filename (works like ShellExecute(Ex)) will use the default browser, but if you want to make sure they use IE (maybe the HTML files are scripted only for IE, for example) use the InternetExplorer object or use Process.Start("iexplore.exe", _pathToHtmlFile_). Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles

Thanks for the advice, got it working. What I did was to override the wndproc and catch the WM_PAINT message, upon which a call to CreateGraphics() let me paint what I want. What I tried originally was overriding the OnPaint method, but that didn't work, never got called I think..? (why?)

An exception might be thrown that would cause execution to stop. What I described is a way of "serializing" it. You're persisting the object in global memory. Here you might have a problem depending on how .NET's DataObject handles a buffer. You still can't simply cross application boundaries with reference data (of which an array is). It needs to be either packed into memory (like strings and primitives) or locked in global memory (with COM, there's other ways where you can persist data to storage or stream it, but .NET doesn't expose that which is why I've been working on a library that - among other things - contains such an implementation). Also keep in mind that simply serializing your TreeNode derivative might not be appropriate. Remember that there are other public properties that the BinaryFormatter will traverse and serialize, like the Parent property (so you're actually serializing almost an entire tree because of the references). You should implement ISerializable and serialize only what you need (Text, Tag, etc.). Don't forget about the constructor with the serialization signature. Microsoft MVP, Visual C# My Articles

Hi, You can intercept the button down message (WM_LBUTTONDOWN) or any button in the PreTranslateMessage(MSG* pMsg): BOOL CYourDialog::PreTranslateMessage(MSG* pMsg) { if(pMsg->message == WM_LBUTTONDOWN) { CWnd *wnd = CWnd::FromHandle(pMsg->hwnd); int ID = wnd->GetDlgCtrlID(); if(ID == IDC_OWNBUTTON1) { MessageBox("IDC_OWNBUTTON1"); return TRUE; } // .... if(ID == IDC_OWNBUTTON_N) { MessageBox("IDC_OWNBUTTON_N"); return TRUE; } } return CDialog::PreTranslateMessage(pMsg); } The IDC_OWNBUTTON1 ... IDC_OWNBUTTON_N is an custom control id's Ivan Cachicatari www.latindevelopers.com

I've thought of that as well. But I really don't have a clue as of what the maximum number of controls is. I could of course create a ridiculously large amount of CButton objects to be on the safe side, and just hide/show those. But it sounds a bit unneccessary to me... And I'm still very much interested in attaching a message handler dynamically. Can I for example create a hook and install it for every new item? And in that hook listen for the BN_CLICKED event and if one is received obtain the text for the control and pass it further on? If so, how is a hook procedure attached?

Of course you're right, Heath.:doh: This is what you get when you don't actually try out your own suggestions...