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In my current project I dynamically create controls in a container for the settings dialog.  I was getting some flicker so I mistakenly used LockWindowUpdate() to solve the problem.  I had used this API call years ago, so I knew of it and then discovered via the EMB newsgroups that using LockWindowUpdate() is a common, and very bad practice.  Thanks to Karl Pritchett and Remy Lebeau for setting me straight and providing some of the following  resource links:

http://blogs.msdn.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?q=LockWindowUpdate&sections=2905

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd145034(VS.85).aspx

What is surprising is that Delphi’s VCL doesn’t provide a native mechanism to achieve this, and document it as the preferred method.  The VCL isolates developers from the WinAPI messages for the most part and this appears to be a fairly common issue from my google searches.  If you’ve ever burned time on this, or think it would be a valuable additional to the VCL, consider voting for QC 88375.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 24th, 2010 at 11:16 am and is filed under Delphi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.