The lack of documentation

Post by **TiKu** » 27 Mar 2007, 00:14

You may wonder why ExplorerTreeView 2.0 and ExplorerListView do not yet have Vista support. Well, it's because Microsoft has decided to give Win32 developers the finger and push .net and XAML instead.

If you're writing .net/XAML programs, you get good documentation and lots of help in the MSDN forums. But if you're writing Win32 programs you get neither of them. Documentation of the new comctl32 stuff introduced with Vista is a bad joke. For the not that usual case that something is mentioned by the docs, you've still good chances that it's either a useless one-liner or just wrong.
Here're some samples of new comctl32 features that are not documented and I'm not able to make work in my controls:

(TreeView) Rich tooltips (TVS_EX_RICHTOOLTIP)
(TreeView) Extended style 0x00000001 used by Windows Explorer
(ListView) Groups in virtual mode
(ListView) Group footers
(ListView) Group subsets
(ListView) Group extended icons (LVGROUP::iExtendedImage)
(ListView) Extended tile view
(ListView) Alphablending for background image (LVBKIF_FLAG_ALPHABLEND)

Also it's not documented how to get Vista style drag images. Using lots of trial and error, I finally got Vista style drag images more or less working, but I've still not found out how to append some description text to the drag image as Vista's Explorer is doing.

At the moment writing Win32 software seems to be a waste of time.