Internal Wrapper Functions

The helper functions, used in our example SimpleButton control, are just wrapper functions using GetWindowLong and SetWindowLong to get and set the internal and external variables/properties: __GetIntProperty, __SetIntProperty, __GetExtProperty and __SetExtProperty.

The internal variables/properties are not exposed to the end-user by design (this can of course be changed if you need to or your control requires it for whatever reason).

I borrowed my earlier technique of using constants to name the properties/variables used, and to define the offsets into the memory blocks, as this allows us to define easily readable property (or variable) names to use with out helper functions. It is much easier to use and read code like:

Invoke __GetExtProperty, hControl, @SimpleButtonBackColor

than:

Invoke __GetExtProperty, hControl, 24

We can clearly see the property we are referring to, in this case it relates to a back color or background color of our control.

For the end-user who will use our SimpleButton control they can access the external properties via calls to SimpleButtonGetProperty and SimpleButtonSetProperty or by using the custom messages: SB_GETPROPERTY, SB_SETPROPERTY, SB_GETSTATE and SB_SETSTATE with the SendMessage api call. These functions then call the appropriate internal helper functions (wrapper functions for GetWindowLong and SetWindowLong).