Simon Whiteside of Lateral Arts (Wokingham, Berks., UK) releases Dialog Editor Controls Pack for Win32. The Dialog Editor Controls Pack, provides a simple and powerful method of integrating dialog editing into your own product. Special purpose dialog box editors are now the preferred method of enabling user interaction from Windows macro languages. Everyday retail products, such as Microsoft Excel and Word, now include special purpose dialog box editors. As Windows macro languages continue to grow in importance, so does the need for serious GUI interaction. In the past, macro languages simply provided hooks to bring up canned dialog boxes. In this scenario, the user might be able to change some message text and maybe button labels if he was lucky. If your product allows macro language programmability, you can be assured that your users will soon demand dialog box editing capability.
As a Windows developer, you've probably used dialog editors since your first day in the SDK. However, the familiar Windows SDK Dialog Editor (DLGEDIT.EXE) cannot be redistributed with your application. Furthermore, most customers can be expected to balk at having to buy and install an SDK just to have dialog box editing capabilities. Again, the Dialog Editor Controls Pack enables you to seamlessly integrate such capabilities. It includes controls providing a dialog editor user interface along with a message programming interface.
Whiteside's pack provides two windows controls to help you build dialog editors for your tools. You can employ these standard windows controls in many ways: from raw dialog definition editors all the way up to code generators. The principle control is the "Dialog Editor control" (or DLGEDIT). This control has its own programming interface allowing you to add or modify the controls it owns. It also has a user-interface allowing the user to move and resize its controls.
This pack also supplies a "Palette control" (or DLGPAL) which understands the programming interface to the dialog editor. This allows you to provide a customizable "tool palette" from which the user can drag controls to be added to the dialog editor. The palette control can handle up any mix of up to 100 controls simultaneously.
You can load each DLL using LoadLibrary(). Alternately, you may link to the import libraries DLGEDIT.LIB and DLGPAL.LIB. The functions DeLoad() and DpLoad() initiatize each DLGEDIT.DLL and DLGPAL.DLL respectively.
The CUG distribution of Dialog Editor Controls Pack for Win32 includes DLLs and documentation. If required, source code is available by special agreement from the author. Dialog Editor Controls Pack version 2.10 as released 12/28/97 is available on CUG CD-ROM as volume #498.