Introduction

Introduction

mCtrl is a library providing set of additional user interface controls for Windows, intended to be complementary to standard controls from USER32.DLL and COMCTL32.DLL.

System Requirements and Compatibility Notes

MCTRL.DLL is aimed to MS Windows 2000 and newer (i.e. MS Windows 2000, MS Windows XP, MS Windows Server 2003, MS Windows Vista, MS Windows Server 2008 and MS Windows 7), both 32 and 64-bit versions.

Features

• API resembles the standard Windows controls. I.e. the API of controls is based on sending messages via SendMessage().
• mCtrl uses internally Unicode strings, but the API follows the Win32 Unicode/ANSI duality. I.e. if a message or structure uses strings, there are usually two flavors of the message or structure. Unicode flavor uses the suffix "W", while ANSI uses suffix "A". Public headers offer Unicode/ANSI resolution name which is defined to be one or other, according to as the preprocessor macro UNICODE is defined.
• Of course mCtrl attempts to provide consistent look and feel of the controls with standard Windows GUI controls. This includes support for XP theming, also known as Visual Styles.
• mCtrl does not use any user-visible strings, hence it is language and locale neutral.

These topics are more closely covered in Design Notes.

Using mCtrl

Using mCtrl is as easy as of any other library. Include the relevant public headers (in the downloaded packages under include/mCtrl. Within mCtrl, each GUI control or other module has its own header file.

Note that to minimize the chance of filename clashes you should instruct your C compiler to search for include files to include directory and then specify the mCtrl subdirectory within the include directives.

#include <mCtrl/some_header.h>

Alternatively, there is also all-in-one header, which includes all mCtrl public headers.

#include <mCtrl.h>

Finally, link with the appropriate import library. Import libraries live in subdirectory lib or lib64 (for 32-bit or 64-bit binaries respectively). In both directories, thw following import libs can be found:

• libmctrl.a intended for gcc-based toolchains (e.g. mingw).
• mCtrl.lib intended for MS Visual Studio and Microsoft C compiler.

Of course you have then distribute your applications with MCTRL.DLL, which is located in subdirectory bin or bin64 respectively.