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Figure 6.10.
A typical About
dialog box.
Figure 6.10 represents a typical About dialog box. It contains the program name, the
copyright information, and the application’s icon. The resource script definition for the
dialog box is shown in Listing 6.2.
Listing 6.2. A dialog box resource definition.
1: IDD_ABOUT DIALOG 58, 53, 194, 119
2: STYLE DS_MODALFRAME | WS_POPUP |
3: WS_VISIBLE | WS_CAPTION | WS_SYSMENU
4: CAPTION “About TMMPlayer Example Program”
5: FONT 8, “MS Sans Serif”
6: {
7: DEFPUSHBUTTON “OK”, IDOK, 72, 96, 50, 14
8: CTEXT “TMMPlayer Example Program”, -1, 48, 22, 128, 8
9: CTEXT “Copyright © 1996, by Kent Reisdorph”, -1, 32, 47, 136, 8
10: CTEXT “March 15, 1996”, -1, 24, 59, 146, 8
11: CONTROL “”, 99, “button”, BS_GROUPBOX |
12: WS_CHILD | WS_VISIBLE | WS_GROUP, 12, 4, 176, 70
13: CONTROL 1, 1, “static”, SS_ICON |
14: SS_SUNKEN | WS_CHILD | WS_VISIBLE, 24, 17, 20, 20
15: }
The resource script contains information that Windows uses to build the dialog box at
runtime. This information includes the number and type of controls on the dialog box, as
well as their size, position, text, options, and so on. Of course, the resource script also includes
the same type of information for the dialog box itself.
Some Windows programmers don’t use a dialog box editor at all, but prefer to write the dialog
box definition from scratch with a text editor. While I can’t fault those programmers for
creating dialog boxes in this manner, I can say that for most programmers to take that
approach would be, er, less than 100 percent efficient. It would take many times longer to
create a dialog box in that manner than with the visual approach.
Usually all of the application’s dialog box definitions are contained in a single resource script
file that has the filename extension .RC. At some point in the program-creation process, the