A better front end to WinDiff

This article was contributed by Chris Maunder.



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