Creating and Switching to Different Desktops

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Environment: VC6, Win2k, WinXP

After working with systems such as Linux, I was surprised about the missing feature of virtual desktops under Windows systems.

Nevertheless, they are supported by MS, but there is currently no tool to work with them. All tools (such as Stardocks tools and NVidia tools) are limited by one very important feature: If an application on an active screen is blocking, the whole switch is impossible. Son I wrote a little program to handle virtual desktops.

There is also a configuration dialog, used to configure the default shell of an desktop. Normally, this is the explorer.exe, but you can also define other programs. Just select the executable and possible parameters used on starting up the shell process.

The sources are not well documented (and not completely new; the Platform SDK also provides a similar program, btw), and also full of crappy code, but you can use it as a base code to develop your own application.

The main class handling all the related stuff is encapsulated in CMFDeskTopHelper. Also, there are some helper classes for:

• Creating a single input window
• Processing the Registry
• Parsing input keys, and
• Getting hotkey values

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