What's a Wizard?

A wizard is a series of dialogs that run, one by one, inside a frame window. The container window has a few buttons that allow you to move back and forth among the pages. Usually a wizard is composed of three or four different pages. A wizard is there to perform a precise task and to guide you, step by step, through the entire process.

From a programming point of view, a wizard is one of the Windows 95 common controls. To be precise, it's a specialized version of the

PropertySheet
control.

To run a wizard, you need to set up a call to the Win32 API function

PropertySheet
. While making such a call, you're required to specify a number of flags. If you include the constant
PSH_WIZARD
, then the dialogs that form the various sheets will be displayed sequentially, rather than all being available at the same time.

Both the Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 environments are full of wizards. An example is the procedure to create a new shortcut on the desktop.

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