WinController Details

The functions are organized alphabetically and in categories: Application and Window Control Functions, System Information Functions, Menu Functions, Internet Functions, etc. (see the Help file for the complete list). Each function is extremely simple to use - normally a single line of code -; and all are tested on all the 32-bit Windows versions (95/98/Me, NT/2000).

In addition WinController incorporates sophisticated error handling capabilities and comes with a full-featured and commented sample application ready to run. The detailed documentation even includes an introduction to the Windows API for newcomers. Representing thousands of hours of development and testing, this component is a must-have for anyone wanting to do that little bit extra with Windows.

WinController is an ActiveX component which allows Developers to harness the power of the Windows API (Application Programming Interface) to enhance their applications with functionality not offered by most programming languages, and to integrate with other applications on the Desktop.

WinController offers a solution to all of these problems by wrapping up much of the most commonly required functionality, enhancing and simplifying it where appropriate, adapting it to support the different Windows platforms (where necessary it detects the platform at runtime and performs the action appropriate for that platform) and exposing it in an extremely easy-to-use form.

If your goal is to add enhanced Windows API-type functionality to your applications with the minimum of effort and the lowest learning requirement, or simply to improve productivity with the help of a wide-ranging library of generally useful functions tested across all 32-bit Windows versions, then WinController is for you.

And when the next version of Windows is released let us worry about testing its behavior and making any changes necessary to ensure that the WinController functions behave in a manner as consistent as possible with the earlier versions.

With the help of WinController a client application can:

• Launch and manipulate other Windows applications
• Find, hide, restore, resize, maximize, minimize, center, freeze, close, or send messages to any window on the desktop (and many more actions)
• Alter the properties of windows or controls to affect their behavior and appearance. For example: whether a window has a caption bar or whether it is ‘Always On Top’; whether a check box displays at the left or the right of its caption
• Bring windows to the front, click buttons and menu items on any window. Remove buttons and menu items from any window
• Implement dynamic menus, and automatic and custom popup menus
• Launch, monitor and terminate processes
• Implement System Tray icons
• Add standard and internet shortcuts to the Desktop, Start Menu or any other location
• Interact with the Windows Shell: e.g. show or hide the Task Bar; add to or clear the recently used documents list; set the PC clock, wallpaper etc
• Perform directory searches, create and delete directories
• Return a wide variety of information about the system and its hardware
• Return a wide variety of information about the operating system and software environment
• Return a wide variety of information about any file and perform file operations (e.g. Append)
• Manipulate profile (.INI) files
• Manipulate the system registry
• Determine if there is an active internet connection, launch HTML documents and URLs
• Play audio without launching a media player
• Monitor keyboard keys
• Print data and text files
• Encrypt and decrypt text
• Write to the system Event Log
• Manipulate the clipboard
• Perform timing functions
• Format strings and numbers

And if the Windows API functionality you want is not offered WinController offers functions to Post or Send messages to any window which will in many cases will enable you to do what you require.

WinController also offers sophisticated error handling. Many things can go wrong when working with other applications on a machine over which you have no control. WinController allows you to trap errors in a professional manner and return friendly error codes and text to the calling application to be acted upon as you choose. For more information on this see the Error Handling section in the User Manual or Help file.

When the WinController component is installed on the workstation, a Developer building an application with a product which supports the use of ActiveX components (such as Visual Basic or Delphi) can access any of the WinController methods (functions) and properties from within their code.

WinController is a 32-bit in process OLE server DLL which may be used on any 32-bit Windows platform (NT/2000 or 95/98/Me). A few WinController functions do not work with all the Windows versions as they offer functionality which is not available in these versions but where this is the case it is clearly pointed out in the documentation (see individual function descriptions for details) and the functions do not fail.

WinController includes a fully detailed and commented sample Visual Basic project which demonstrates how to call the component functions.

WinController is a sister product to WordController which is for Microsoft Word integration and ExcelController which is for Microsoft Excel integration. All the products work in a similar way but are completely independent of one another.

WinController Main

WinController is electronically deliverd.