Question

I am using plain Win32 API (no MFC I mean) to create a simple app. I use CreateWindowEx with STATUSCLASSNAME as specified in MSDN but the handle returned is NULL. I made a call to InitCommonControlsEx as indicated but that returns FALSE! So I suspect that’s the reason why the bar isn’t created. What’s going on? Please help.

I am on Windows 7 64 bit.

hStatusBar = ::CreateWindowExW(
  0,
  L"STATUSCLASSNAME",
  L"",
  WS_VISIBLE|WS_CHILD|WS_BORDER,
  0,0,0,0, hWnd, 0, hInstance, NULL
);

Answer 1

There is one simple mistake in your code. STATUSCLASSNAME is not a value this is a constant from < commctrl.h >. So you code actually should looks like this:

 #include <commctrl.h>
 .
 .
 .
 hStatusBar = ::CreateWindowExW(
 0,
 STATUSCLASSNAME,
 L"",
 WS_VISIBLE|WS_CHILD|WS_BORDER,
 0,0,0,0, hWnd, 0, hInstance, NULL
);

I suppose you was looking into this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb775491%28v=VS.85%29.aspx#STATUSCLASSNAME but as it specified, there are constants in the left column not values