Question

First I’ll explain what exactly I want to do here. I have a dialog box in which I am showing a frame. Using menu from this dialog, I open another Dialog box which shows me macrogrid block information from the first dialog. So to show 2nd dialog box I am using function : DialogBox(hInst, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDD_DIALOG1), NULL, DialogProc);
But this transfers the execution of the program to the new dialog box and I can’t process further messages in the 1st dialog unless I close the new dialog box.

Can someone please tell me a way to solve this problem??? Is it the same thing as modal vs modeless dialog-boxes??

Someone suggested me to use BackgroundWorker thread for this purpose. But when I tried to research about it, I read at many places that it doesn’t work with win32 programming. Instead in some forums I read about using PostMessage function for the same purpose. Can someone help me deciding what would be the best approach to handle this problem? I would really be grateful if someone could explain it in detail.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

No, the BackgroundWorker component is for .NET projects, not for Win32 applications. And it’s designed to run non-GUI operations on a background thread. You still should keep all GUI operations limited to a single thread, even in a .NET application.

But like you said, the problem here is that you’re creating a modal dialog, which prevents the user from interacting with anything else in your program until that dialog is closed. The DialogBox function always creates a modal dialog.

If you want a modeless dialog, call the CreateDialog function instead. Modeless dialogs do not block execution until they are closed. You can re-use the same dialog template with this function that you did with DialogBox.