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<hr><body><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">I think that B4PPC could be useful on the desktop as well as on the device as a
simpler and cheaper, albeit lower performance, development environment than Visual
Studio or SharpDevelop. I owe a debt to Dimitris Zacharakis who provided his
dzForm object in his zHWdesktop library and sparked my interest in providing
something more complete.</span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">I have taken that as inspiration and implemented a FormExDesktop library to make
Basic4PPC more usable on the desktop. I have given an extended form the ability to
"inherit" a normal Basic4PPC form so that the IDE can be used to lay out forms and
menus. It is modeled as far as possible on the Form control in Basic4PPC with extra
properties and methods appropriate for a desktop application. Using this library,
together with my RichTextDesktop printer formatting library, should greatly increase
the quality and capability of Basic4PPC desktop applications. </span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">All the background Form drawing methods except GetPixel have been implemented.
The names have had to be prefixed as the original names get special treatment in
Basic4PPC so that methods that have the same names are not invoked in a library.
Because, unlike Basic4PPC, drawings on an extended form are not persistent a Paint
event has been provided. Drawing commands should be placed in this event if the
drawings are required to persist after resizing. Experiment will indicate where this is
going to be necessary.</span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">This form can be used with both the ControlsEx and Formlib libraries with one
important caveat. Do NOT attach a Formlib object to one of these forms. This is
because a Formlib object expects to be associated with a Basic4PPC form and does
some drawing command related things on a window resize that are not compatible
with a normal Windows form. You lose nothing by not being able to do this as a more
complete set of resizing events is available in this library. If you need a Formlib
object place it on a Basic4PPC donor form. I would expect all present and future
libraries to be usable alongside this library.</span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">In Basic4PPC a function that expects a Control object can receive a string (or any
expression that evaluates to a string) with the name of a Basic4ppc control (Basic4ppc
will convert it to the required reference) or a Control object (which can only come
from an external library). Using this fact controls can be added to an extended form at
runtime. Basic4PPC controls may be added to a donor form and then transferred to an
extended form by the forms' AddControl("namestring") method. Controls from the
ControlsEx, or other control libraries, can be added by specifiying the extended forms'
ControlRef property -  ThisForm.ControlRef - rather than a string "Formname" in the
controls' New constructor.</span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">You will notice the reference to commercial use in the string returned from the About
property. While I freely give permission, and indeed encourage, use of this library for
personal non-profit use I feel that it is reasonable to prohibit its' use in any non-personal or commercial application without previous discussion with myself as to the
conditions under which it may be used. I hope that the reasons for this are obvious as
a substantial amount of my time and a lot of effort has gone into producing and testing
this library, its' helpfile and the accompanying demonstration program. </span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">This help file documents version 1.4 of FormExDesktop.dll</span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">Andrew Graham</span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt"><br></span></font></div><div align="left"><font face="Times New Roman"><span style=" font-size:12pt">andy@agraham.demon.co.uk</span></font></div><div align="left"> </div></body></html>
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