Tabs, property sheets, and wizards are what I refer to as the “whiz-bang” common controls. These controls are extremely popular right now; it seems as if every new application (or every new version of an existing application) is using property sheets and wizards liberally. This is a nice development for new users because a feature like a wizard can walk them gently through a new or complicated task.
For those of us who have been programming for longer than we care to mention, property sheets replace those awful, cascading, modal dialog boxes that we've come to know and despise. You've all had the experience of successfully navigating down through all those layers to actually set a value, such as a network address, only to discover that you've forgotten some key piece of information, forcing you to cancel out of each and every dialog box and then to navigate down again. This is when you pick up your foam baseball bat and whack your computer monitor. (A tip for the uninitiated: Don't use the wood or aluminum bat! Although the immediate rush is terrific, you'll have a devil of a time explaining it to your boss.) Now, however, by using a property sheet instead of the modal dialog boxes, you can move easily among all the different properties that need to be set rather than backtracking through layers of dialog boxes.
This chapter covers the whiz-bang common controls that Microsoft Windows 95 supports, and it offers some details about how you can create and use them in your C application. At the time this book was written, MFC did not support Windows 95–style property sheets and wizards.