Keyboard Tabbing Stops working on Windows GUI

Question

I have a windows gui built in Microsoft Visual C++ and when the user performs a certain set of actions the keyboard tabbing to move from widget to widget stops working.

Simply put, there are two list boxes with an add and a remove buttons. Selecting a row in listbox #1 and pressing the add button removes the object from list box #1 and moves it to list box #2. The problem I am seeing is that the keyboard tabbing functionality goes away since the tab focus was on the add button which become desensitized when the add callback is completed (since no row in list box #1 is selected currently).

I want to be able to re-set the tab focus to listbox #1 (but not the selection of a particular row). Any ways to do this? I believe I am running as a standard modal dialog.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, you just want to set the focus back to one of the listboxes. Since this is in a dialog, instead of calling SetFocus, The Old New Thing recommends you send a message to the listbox's hWnd to do this:

void SetDialogFocus(HWND hdlg, HWND hwndControl)
{
    SendMessage(hdlg, WM_NEXTDLGCTL, (WPARAM)hwndControl, TRUE);
}