A typical application uses a menu bar and several pull-down submenus. The pull-down submenus ordinarily are hidden, but become visible when the user makes selections in the menu bar. Pull-down submenus always are attached to the menu bar.

The menu bar is a child of the frame window; the menu bar window handle is the key to communicating with the menu bar and its submenus. You can retrieve this handle by calling WinWindowFromID, with the handle of the parent window and the FID_MENU frame-control identifier. Most messages for the menu bar and its submenus can be issued to the menu-bar window. Flags in the messages tell the window whether to search submenus for requested menu items.