Enhanced Windows List Developer Studio Addin

Sample Image

Introduction

Ever got frustrated with unpredictable behavior of thestandard "Windows" dialog box? EnhancedWindowList is an add-in that unobtrusively replaces standard "Windows" dialog and provides extended functionality. Its features include (see picture above):

Windows list may be sorted by document name, path, type and status.
Windows may be filtered by document type. For example, you can select to include into list only windows with *.C;*.CPP;*.CXX or *.TLI document.
Document path is always shown.
Size of the dialog window may be changed.
Current settings (types of windows to be included into list, sorting criteria, width of columns, sizes and position of the window) are saved and restored while dialog initialization.
This dialog is an actual replacement for standard dialog. You need not assign special key or toolbar button to invoke it. It will be always shown instead of standard dialog in spite of way it is invoked.

Installation

Build the EnhancedWindowList.dsp project (or unzip downloaded EnhancedWindowList_demo.zip) and copy EnhancedWindowList.dll into Program Files\microsoft visual studio\common\msdev98\addins
Open Tools | Customize | Add-ins and Macro Files and tick "Inpek 7th world EnhancedWindowList".
Window | Windows... You should have replaced dialog.

Limitations

This add-in most likely would not work in non-english versions of DevStudio. It is due to way it is trying to determine that standard "Windows" dialog is initializing. See section "How it works" for more details.

Context help is not implemented.

I have only been able to test the add-in in VC6.0. It should work in 5.0, but if it doesn't you are welcome to fix it and I will incorporate any changes into the original.

How it works

On loading, the add-in registers a thread wide window procedure hook, which it uses to wait for WM_INITDIALOG on the "Windows" dialog. This technique have been first used by Simon Capewell in his excellent DevTrueColor add-in. We use the existence of a couple of buttons to verify the identity of the dialog. These buttons are Tile Horizontally and Tile Vertically. We check their IDs and texts to be sure that we are trying to intercept proper dialog box. The original dialog box is hidden, and the Enhanced Windows List dialog is created.

Acknowledgements

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here

About the Author

Yuri Tkachov

Web Developer

Russian Federation

Member

Yuri Tkachov is a leading programmer and owner of Inpek 7th world. He is also a (co-)author of several programming-related books, one of which is rather popular: "DirectX-Programmierung mit Visual C++", Addison-Wesley, ISBN 3-8273-1389-9 (in German). He's been programming in Algol/Assembler/Fortran/C/C++ for 15 years and Visual C++/MFC for 5 years.
His background includes pure and applied mathematics, computational methods and computer graphics.
Click here to visit Yuri Tkachov's homepage, which is more likely to have updates and betas of EnhancedWindowList Add-in.

Article Top

Poor

Excellent

Add a reason or comment to your vote: x
Votes of 3 or less require a comment

Comments and Discussions

You must Sign In to use this message board. (secure sign-in)

Search this forum
	Profile popups Noise Layout Per page

btw

eXplodus

11:15 21 Jan '03

if you change this ... `const TCHAR* HORZ_BUTTON_TEXT = _T("Tile &Horizontally"); const TCHAR* VERT_BUTTON_TEXT = _T("Tile &Vertically");` to this ... `const TCHAR* HORZ_BUTTON_TEXT = _T("Ü&bereinander"); const TCHAR* VERT_BUTTON_TEXT = _T("&Nebeneinander");` then, its also working in the german vc++ ide ... same problem to all other languages ...
Sign In·View Thread·Permalink

Why is it useful?

Vitaly Belman

12:03 17 Jul '01

I'd like to know if I am missing something good. What the Window List is good for? Why would I like to touch it at all? (Not talking about your Add-in but specifically about the Window List in VC++ at all) Vitaly Belman
Sign In·View Thread·Permalink

Re: Why is it useful?

Andreas Saurwein

2:56 21 Aug '01

Hey, there are people out there who's projects are not made up of one source file. And then it happens that they need to open more then one window at a time. In this case, if not using the excellent WndTabs addin, you "might" use the "Windows..." dialog. Cheers
Sign In·View Thread·Permalink

Re: Why is it useful?

Philippe Lhoste

0:18 14 Feb '02

Note that I have installed both WndTabs and this add-on (or addin?).
Sometime, I get confused with 3 rows of tabs, and I find having all the filenames aligned in one column easing the search of a given file.
Plus it allows at a glance to see if an opened file is in the current project or not (with the display of the path), which files are read-only, etc.

It is small, nice, excellent!
Actually, I rewrite it from scratch (non-MFC) for the SciTE editor...

In case you are wondering, too: you can open a lot of files without workspace (eg. debugging a CGI exe), so the Workspace window is useless in this case. That's too bad, it should be used to display opened files.

--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--=#=--
Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/

Dialog crashes the DevStudio

Rolf Timm

2:42 1 Mar '01

Hi, unfortunately the window dialog crashes the DevStudio on activation when i am in debug mode. Rolf
Sign In·View Thread·Permalink

Re: Dialog crashes the DevStudio

Yuri

3:02 1 Mar '01

This bug is already fixed. You can download latest sources and DLL from my site.
Sign In·View Thread·Permalink

Windows stay minimized

Matthew Ellis

5:11 20 Feb '01

Hi Yuri! Great add-in - finally sorts out Microsoft's horribly qiurky dialog. Just one minor problem - if a window is minimized, but selected in the list and double-clicked, it becomes the active window but stays minimized, which is somewhat annoying, and not what Microsoft's does. Here's a fix for the OnOK function which sorts this out. It checks to see if the window is currently minimized, and if so, sets it's state to normal. If it isn't minimized, it doesn't do anything

void EWLDialog::OnOK()
{
POSITION pos = m_listWindows.GetFirstSelectedItemPosition();
while (pos != NULL)
{
int iItem = m_listWindows.GetNextSelectedItem(pos);
ITEM_DATA *idata = (ITEM_DATA *)m_listWindows.GetItemData(iItem);

VARIANT_BOOL bactive(VARIANT_TRUE);
idata->pWindow->put_Active(bactive);

DsWindowState state;
if(SUCCEEDED(idata->pWindow->get_WindowState(&state)) && state==dsWindowStateMinimized)
{
idata->pWindow->put_WindowState(dsWindowStateNormal);
}
}

CResizableDialog::OnOK();
}

Thanks again - and keep up the good work!
Matt

Thanks a lot for this great tool

Christoph Weber

23:37 19 Feb '01

I was thinking of doing something similar myself for some time now because the normal window list is IMHO unusable.
But now I have time for something else (code is already finished for some time) - I'll post it the next few weeks.

Somethimes I can really get angry about microsoft for making such tiny and uncomfortable dialogs (not to speak about resizeable).

Really well done!

Many greetings from Germany,

Christoph

Re: Thanks a lot for this great tool

Matthew Ellis

5:17 20 Feb '01

"Sometimes I can really get angry about microsoft for making such tiny and uncomfortable dialogs"

Yeah, I know what you mean. I used to hate the windows list, especially as I tend to work with rather deep directory structures. Then I found a nice little tip that worked wonders. Just about all of the dialogs in msdev are held in resources in the .pkg files. So, simply load them into a resource editor (such as msdev!) and resize them to your hearts content. This gave me a much more useable windows list (now totally replaced with Yuri's add-in though), a much wider find window, and a much bigger quick watch window - all of which make life just that little bit better... And don't forget you can change the styles of windows and controls, too. Especially those combo boxes that limit the edit box length.

As always, be careful when doing this - and MAKE A BACKUP FIRST!!

Re: Thanks a lot for this great tool

Christoph Weber

11:55 20 Feb '01

I know about the possibility to many of the msdev and system dialogs and did it it the past several times, but after the next service pack everything is lost, so I gave up on this.
But nevertheless thanks for the tip - I guess it will be useful to somebody else.
Especially for this list the main problem was always the file path - I want to select the item trough "bild typing" its name in the list, but this does only work if there is only the file name (without a full Path) or even better the file path separated like in this great tool.

Selected item not always visible

Heinz

21:43 19 Feb '01

The current file is not always in the visible part of the list, if many files are open. The following addition to EWLDialog::FillWindowsList() solves this problem. Insert these lines after the SortItems() call: // ensure selected item is visible int itemCount = m_listWindows.GetItemCount(); for (int i=0; i
Sign In·View Thread·Permalink

Re: Selected item not always visible

Yuri

1:19 20 Feb '01

Thank you for your suggestion. It solves the problem indeed. Updated source codes and DLL are already posted to my site. I will post them to codeproject as soon as possible.
Sign In·View Thread·Permalink