Dialogs and Controls

Dialogs and Controls
What Windows program does not have a dialog box? an edit box? a button? Dialog boxes
and controls are vital to Windows user interfaces, and all of them, even the simple
button or piece of static text, are windows. The common controls enable you to take
advantage of the learning time users have devoted to other programs and the
programming time developers have put in on the operating system in order to use the
same File Open dialog box as everybody else, the same hierarchical tree control, and so
on. Learn more about all these controls in Chapters 2, "Dialogs and Controls," and 10,
"Windows 95 Common Controls."
Messages and Commands
Messages form the heart of Windows programming. Whenever anything happens on a
Windows machine, such as a user clicking the mouse or pressing a key, a message is
triggered and sent to one or more windows, which do something about it. Visual C++
makes it easy for you to write code that catches these messages and acts on them.
Chapter 3, "Messages and Commands," explains the concept of messages and how MFC and
other aspects of Visual C++ enable you to deal with them.
The View/Document Paradigm
A paradigm is a model, a way of looking at things. The designers of MFC chose to design
the framework based on the assumption that every program has something it wants to
save in a file. That collection of information is referred to as the document. A view is one
way of looking at a document. There are many advantages to separating the view and
the document, explained further in Chapter 4, "Documents and Views." MFC provides