By way of pointing out the obvious -- if you have an 820 pixel high dialog on a 600 pixel high display, part of it will be cut off no matter what.

In your first example, the one without the C-style cast, the type system should prevent you from performing an illegal assignment -- in other words the right thing would have to happen or a compiler error be generated. Because the compiler will not allow the following: typedef int(* FUNC_ONE)(int); int Func2Parm(int x, int y) { return x + y; } FUNC_ONE pFuncOne = Func2Parm; Once you introduce the explicit cast, I am not sure what will happen. I would have guessed that the compiler would report an ambiguity error (after all it could cast either pointer that way).

You pretty much don't. The security screen is on a different desktop (read up on Windows Desktop objects) which is completely inaccessible to normal code.

The problem is that function pointer syntax is bizarre (sorry guys it is). In this example you are typdefing a function pointer that returns void and two parameters (ObjectRootPtr, const RTI::AttributeHandleValuePairSet&) to the name UpdateHandler. It does look wierd, but it works. On those occasions I need function pointers, I always have to look at an example because I can never quite remember it.

Well, I believe that the background color is GetSysColor(COLOR_3DFACE), as long as XP Visual Styles don't come into play -- they it could be anything, including a bitmap. You would be better served to just call dc->SetBkMode(TRANSPARENT) and just draw transparent text.

Well, as earlier posters have pointed out, dynamic_cast and typeid can be used to extract the information you want. However, to me at least, when you need to do this (and presumably frequently for an astroids game) you might start asking if you have the best possible design. I kind of liked the suggestion of the eariler poster about adding a function like "virtual bool ResolveColision (baseClass *)". Otherwise you could have a huge ugly mess of collision resolution between any 2 possible object types. If you happen to just need to be able to get set of all asteroids in the game, why not keep around an extra container just for astroids (and one for ships, missles, etc). Then you can iterate through any specific object without messing with all the other object types you are not interested in.

Does creating it with WS_EX_NOACTIVATE help?

Are you possibly refering to alloca? I don't think that it was ever in the C standard, but most compiler implmentations (including Visual Studio) do provide it. Given that VS (at least through 2003) does not support local array declaration with a variable number of elements, it is occasionally useful.

You could always try timeSetEvent to create a multimedia timer -- I have used that from time to time. That essentially creates the new thread for you and calls a function you specify when it times out. Saves you some of the details about thread management.

This is a very broad topic. The first part would be to get the graphics themselves. You can download them or create them using the VC bitmap editor or use a third party editor depending on your preferences. It is beyond the scope of these forums to discuss graphics creation. Your best bet will be to get the graphics in .bmp format. Then browse the button classes on this site there are a whole bunch that will display bitmap buttons and select one for your needs and follow the instructions there. As for reshaping the window, for Win2K or higher you could use layered windows and a transparent color key or you could use SetWindowRgn to set the window to a specific shape.

Well, this is how I would do it: CRect clRect; m_ListEx.GetClientRect(clRect); int visibleCount = clRect.Height() / m_ListEx.GetItemHeight(0); while (m_ListEx.GetCount() < visibleCount) { m_ListEx.AddString (_T("Hi")); } Ok, it is a bit of a hack, but given the tools you get in CListBox, this is the best I could come up with.