Splash screen in Windows

Question

How can I display a splash screen using C or C++ in Windows? What libraries or Windows components would be applicable?

Answer 1

A splash screen is typically just a modeless dialog with a static picture control covering its surface, or even just a normal window that loads and blits a bitmap to its client area. CodeProject has an example of the latter sort. It uses MFC, but that's a thin enough wrapper over the Win32 API that rewriting it to use Win32 directly should be fairly simple.

Answer 2

Try to create a window with the createwindowex function and use the style (dwStyle) WS_POPUP.
You can read about CreateWindowEx here.