Walkback Font

How do you change the font shown in the walkback dialog? It doesn't
seem to respond to the default font I set in Dolphin, nor to the font
I set for message boxes in Windows.

Patrick,

> How do you change the font shown in the walkback dialog? It doesn't
> seem to respond to the default font I set in Dolphin, nor to the font
> I set for message boxes in Windows.

I don't think you can change the walkback in this way.  It's, IIRC, one of
the few Dolphin views that is predefined and stored in a native Windows
format (I can't recall the correct terminology) so that it is less
susceptible to errors in Dolphin's View code.  I think the reason is just
that if you get a walkback you want to try and ensure that the dialog is
visible and not broken by the same fault that caused it to appear - if you
see what I mean.

--
Ian

Use the Reply-To address to contact me.
Mail sent to the From address is ignored.

"Patrick Huffer" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
> How do you change the font shown in the walkback dialog? It doesn't
> seem to respond to the default font I set in Dolphin, nor to the font
> I set for message boxes in Windows.

As Ian says, the walkback dialog is loaded from a template stored in the VM.
And, as he suggests, this is to make it as robust as possible.

If you really want to change the font you could do so by editing the
template in DolphinVM005.DLL (e.g. using VisualStudio, or any other tool
that can edit resources in compiled executables). It is, BTW, possible to
configured a Windows dialog template to use the "shell font" (which is
either the message box or icon font, I'm not sure which), but unfortunately
the font size remains hard coded in the template.

Another approach would be to modify the font dynamically after the dialog
has opened (which is effectively what the MVP framework does for normal
dialogs), but this would have to be done carefully to avoid introducing new
failure points. Also this is much trickier than it sounds for a dialog
template, since without the assistance of layout managers you are going to
have to resize all the controls and the dialog itself appropriately to suit
the new font. If you use a resource editor to edit the DLL, on the other
hand, Windows will do the resizing at load time based on the logical dialog
units and the font.

Regards

Blair

Patrick,

> As Ian says, the walkback dialog is loaded from a template stored in the VM.
> And, as he suggests, this is to make it as robust as possible.

What is your goal in changing the font?  Walkbacks are something that
only developers will see, so they will hopefully be a more understanding
and forgiving audience.  For end users with deployed excutables, the
debugger and friends will be removed, but you can still get reflective
information about the callstack.  I have long logged such information to
one of a few places (depending on circumstances), but seldom display it
to users.  One exception is a web system that dumps callstacks when it
gets into troubles - users seem to almost reflexively print it and give
it to me.

Does that help?

Have a good one,

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]