You use the Dialog Editor to create and modify dialog boxes, and to create and modify the controls and text within dialog boxes. As you create the dialog box and its controls, you see them on the screen as the user will see them when your program is run. You can place each dialog box and its controls where you want them on the screen. In addition, you can test the dialog box before you incorporate it into your application.

Each dialog box and control can have either an integer identifier or a symbolic identifier that equates to an integer identifier. You use the identifier in your application to refer to the dialog box or control. If you intend to use symbolic identifiers in your application, you must enter the symbolic and integer identifiers in an include file. If you do not use symbolic names, the Dialog Editor supplies an integer identifier for each control and for the dialog box itself. You can use the Dialog Editor to create the include file, or you can use a text editor to create the include file before using the Dialog Editor.

It is good programming practice to plan the resources that your application will use and to choose a naming and numbering convention for the symbolic or integer identifiers before you create them. Keep the include file separate from other include files used by your application. The Dialog Editor will use only #define statements from an include file. It ignores everything else it finds in the file.

Although the Dialog Editor draws dialog boxes and controls on the screen so you can see what they look like when used by your application, it does not save them as graphics. Instead, the Dialog Editor saves them in an ASCII-text format file that has a .DLG extension. Refer to the dialog template section of this chapter.

The Dialog Editor also creates a compiled form of the .DLG file in a resource file with a .RES extension. The .DLG and .RES files can contain more than one dialog box. The resource file can contain other application resources, such as icons, bit maps, and string tables. It is attached to the executable (.EXE) file of the application during the compile and link process.