Re: Open a child process window within a (child) frame
"Uwe Kotyczka" <uwe.kotyczka@web.de> wrote in message
news:16c1448d-0a24-47c8-8641-dabee9db5627@l64g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
Hallo!
I am to write a kind of meta-application, i.e. an application
which provides it's own funcionality and is able to "open" a
bunch of external applications.
I could imagine that the meta-application is a MFC MDI app, say
meta.exe,
which, when it opens an external exe, say a.exe, shows the
main window of a.exe not as a popup window, but as a child of some
MDI child frame instead. (Hope I could make it clear what I wish to
do.)
Simple means like CreateProcess or ShellExecuteEx cannot achieve
such a behaviour. So what would be the best way to implement it?
I can't see why you would want separate processes if they are supposed to
have a common user interface.
Teoretically you may be able to make the processes find out the common main
windows based by Classname and have the other post/send messages to it.
Or they could interface with a workerthread in the first EXE that starts
which the control the user interface.
However, if you want such tight integration you would be better of making
one EXE that, if needed, starts threads that run a function inside a DLL
(maybe DllMain() can start the thread). Or, maybe your idea of dividing to
separate EXE's came up because you don't now about multithreading
(_beginthread or, if CRT not used CreateProcess() ).
MDI is fine... although Microsoft has stopped promoting it's use.
- Sten