I have a dynamically created toolbar on a plain Win32 dialog. My buttons are added with & shortcuts which correctly puts underscore to characters following ampersand but pressing Alt+(char) causes a beep and the button is not clicked.
It has been a while since I have done Win32 API development. Is there something that needs to be done to a dynamically created child window (toolbar) in order for the accelerator keys to work?
This could be something really obvious that I am missing...
The beep indicates that the command isn't handled by any window in your app.
Since you created the toolbar dynamically, I would guess that the toolbar window isn't set up properly as a child window of your main window (i.e., it's parent and owner window are not set).
To test: click on the toolbar so it has the focus, then press Alt- and it should work.
Well... You have to write code to handle these keypresses and convert them into WM_COMMAND messages. The traditional way to do this is to define an accelerator table and process them using TranslateAccelerator() - but of course, you're free to do it however you like... Just make sure the keys you handle jibe with the keys you underline!
You might also find this KB article helpful: How to use accelerator keys within a modal dialog box in Visual C++... Or, for a more in-depth (and MFC-free) look at implementing custom message processing in dialogs, check out Raymond Chen's articles on the dialog manager, specifically part 4: The dialog loop and part 9: Custom accelerators in dialog boxes (but seriously, read the whole thing, you know you want to...)