I am writing a .Net COM DLL that runs inside a native Windows application.
I am attempting to inject an additional pane into this app’s statusbar, and it does not have any specific implementation to do so, so I am trying to subclass the app’s statusbar myself.
I am using the Win32 API SetParent() to switch the parent of a label control from a .Net form to the msctls_statusbar32 instance. I used a label because it is the closest implementation to a native “static” class control that I could find without writing my own control.
Somehow I’ve even managed to get NativeWindow to successfully hook in to both the statusbar and my label’s messages (though at the moment it just passes them all to the next WndProc), and I’ve assigned matching styles and styleExs to my label’s window, and I can see my label as a child with the msctls_statusbar32 as its parent. Everything looks like it should be working correctly, but it’s not. My control does not show up in the parent app’s statusbar.
What I don’t understand is why it is not showing up. Nearly everything I can think of matches correctly — granted, the class for my label is “WindowsForms10.STATIC.app.0.378734a” and not “static”, but other than that it is on the correct process and thread, has matching window styles (at least the hex value… Spy++ seems to enumerate them differently), and for all purposes pretty much blends in with the rest of the controls. Would anybody know what else needs to be done to get it to be visible?
(I had originally gone the route of CreateWindowEx and setting WNDPROC callbacks but I could not get the app to work… it would freeze for a minute or so and then unfreeze, and I would notice my window disappeared from the window tree)
Thank you!
As it turns out the answer was dumbfoundingly simple… the label’s X and Y coords were out of the display area of the statusbar parent. Moving them to (0, 0) and it shows up right there! Of course, now the problems have moved on to: C# WinForms control in .Net COM Server won't redraw