The Common Dialog Boxes

One of the primary goals of Windows when it was initially released was to promote a standardized user interface. For many common menu items, this happened fairly quickly. Almost every software manufacturer adopted the Alt-File-Open selection to open a file. However, the actual file-open dialog boxes were often quite dissimilar.

Beginning with Windows 3.1, a solution to this problem became available. This is an enhancement called the “common dialog box library.” This library consists of several functions that invoke standard dialog boxes for opening and saving files, searching and replacing, choosing colors, choosing fonts (all of which I’ll demonstrate in this chapter), and printing (which I’ll demonstrate in Chapter 13 ...

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