A better front end to WinDiff

Run windiff screenshot

Environment: VC5.0 SP3, VC6.0, Win95, NT4

If you have ever used WinDiff you will be aware of how poor the user interface
for specifying the files or directories is. To this end I developed a simple
application that acts as a front end to WinDiff and allows you to drag and drop files
or directories, or browse for files and directories using the file and directory chooser
dialogs.

The program also remembers it’s last screen location, the files last compared
and the whether or not the dialog was expanded or contracted. The sample demonstrates
collapsable dialogs, window position persistance, and also demonstrates a variation
of Chris Losinger’s great CDropEdit class (in this case a drop-file combobox).

New features

  • Extensive use has been made of Davide Calibro’s flat buttons,
    thanks to Daniel Lyons who felt my original
    UI was a bit boring and gave it a major facelift. Thanks Daniel!

  • The combo’s accept dropped files (previously used drop edit controls) and
    are auto-completing. They store the last 10 files entered and the drop width
    is modified each time a file is added in order to display as much as possible.

  • Directory pickers start from the last directory visited.
  • My ComboBoxEx class has been renamed – hopefully this will fix the VC6
    compilation problem.

Thanks to:

  • Chris Losinger – Drop Edit
  • Vladimir Kvashin, Girish Bharadwaj and Lars Klose – Directory picker class
  • Davide Calibro – Flat buttons
  • Daniel Lyons – UI work and a new approach to collapsable dialogs.
  • Klaus – suggested setting the initial directory of the directory pickers. No idea
    why I didn’t do that in the first place!

Download executable – 20 KB

Download source – 41 KB

Last Updated: November 10, 1998

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