A lightweight modern C++ library for Win32 API, using C++11 lambdas to handle Windows messages.
As far as I can remember, around 2002 I started wrapping all my Win32 routines in classes, to make them reusable to myself, to save my time. Through all these years it took the form of a real library, a thin abstraction layer over raw Win32. People who saw it often commented that it was good, so in 2017 I decided to publish it on GitHub.
Then I wrote CodeProject - WinLamb: using C++11 lambdas to handle Win32 messages, a comprehensive article explaining WinLamb's message handling model, with dialogs and also ordinary windows. Actually, features from C++14 and C++17 are used as well, as much as my compiler (Visual C++) allows it.
Beyond dialog/window message handling, WinLamb also has wrappers for most native Windows controls (textbox, listview, etc.), along with other utility classes (strings, file I/O, COM wrappers, etc.) which play nice together. These controls and utilities, however, are not mandatory: you can use your own classes upon the basic dialog/window infrastructure.
WinLamb by no means covers the whole Win32 API, simply because it's too huge. It just wraps some things. New features are constantly being added, though.
WinLamb is a header-only library. You can clone the repository or simply download the files; once referenced in your source code, it should work right away.
It has been tested with Visual C++ 2017.
This is a simple Win32 program written with WinLamb. Each window has a class, and messages are handled with C++11 lambdas. There's no need to write a message loop or window registering.
// Declaration: SimpleMainWindow.h
#include "winlamb/window_main.h"
class SimpleMainWindow : public wl::window_main {
public:
SimpleMainWindow();
};// Implementation: SimpleMainWindow.cpp
#include "SimpleMainWindow.h"
RUN(SimpleMainWindow); // wraps WinMain call
SimpleMainWindow::SimpleMainWindow()
{
setup.wndClassEx.lpszClassName = L"SOME_CLASS_NAME";
setup.title = L"This is my window";
setup.style |= WS_MINIMIZEBOX;
on_message(WM_CREATE, [this](wl::wm::create p)->LRESULT
{
set_text(L"A new title for the window");
return 0;
});
on_message(WM_LBUTTONDOWN, [](wl::wm::lbuttondown p)->LRESULT
{
bool isCtrlDown = p.has_ctrl();
long xPos = p.pos().x;
return 0;
});
}Full real-world projects can be seen browsing winlamb topic.
Licensed under MIT license, see LICENSE.txt for details.