Owner Drawn Button Clicks

[mark smit]

Hello,

I was just wondering about a funny little thing I saw with my
owner drawn buttons. Owner drawn buttons dont seem to be able to
keep up with double clicks the way normal buttons do. A normal
button responds to each click of the mouse but an owner drawn
button seems to behave like there is a time period that needs to
elapse before you can click on it again. I tried to set the
ODS_SELECTED bit to zero right after I drew my button but that
doesn't seem to help. In general there seems to be a laggy
response from owner drawn buttons...

What do you all have to say about this?

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Cheers

[Steve Hutchesson]

It happens to be that I have just finished a library module in MASM32 that
was aimed at this problem of OS designed owner draw controls being messy
to code and too slow in their operation.

To make it available to PowerBASIC programmers, I wrote a small DLL in MASM
which builds at 3584 bytes in size.

The following address is the test piece that shows how to use it and the DLL.
www.pbq.com.au/home/hutch/download/bmpbutn.zip

It has the following characteristics, you create 2 identical size bitmaps,
one for the UP position, the other for the DOWN which are built into the
resources of your application.

Use LoadBitmap() on each bitmap to get a valid handle for each bitmap.

Call the function with the parent handle, the top X/Y coordinates, both
bitmap handles and a control ID number. The function returns the handle
for the control.

The control autosizes to the bitmap size and there is no requirement to
deallocate the bitmaps after the control is destroyed.

The advantage of this type of control is that you have absolute freedom
with its appearance as it does not have rectangular edges visible so it
can be used to display non rectangular shapes, all you must do is ensure
that the background colour matches the outside colour of the bitmap.

If you have licence to Jeremy Collake's 2 toys, PEbundle and PEcompact,
this DLL is small enough to bundle with the EXE file and then compress
the complete EXE file after so no-one will know that you have used a DLL.

The DLL is licenced as freeware for PowerBASIC programmers and it can be
used in commercial programs without any changes. The only restriction I
place on it is that it should not be sold as an aftermarket ad-on, it can
be supplied with commercial software written in PowerBASIC free of charge.

Regards

[email protected]

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