Introduction

Dialog box control management is a perpetual problem. You want to have certain controls enabled or disabled, visible or invisible, based on the values of other controls. Unlike windows, there is no ON_UPDATE_COMMAND_UI mechanism for doing this. Most books that show examples of how to do it get it wrong. That's because most of them illustrate fairly simple examples, where the simple methods are easy to write and easy to maintain. Unfortunately, in the real world, dialog boxes are usually fairly complex, and the enabling conditions are nontrivial. The simple methods illustrated in the introductory textbooks are considerably less than adequate in this case. A decade of Windows programming has allowed me to develop a methodology for handling this.