Windows – How to use the softkeys with a CDialog based application in windows mobile 6 via MFC

I don't know MFC that good, but maybe you could pull it off by subclassing window procedures of all those controls with a single class, which would only handle cases of pressing cursor keys and pass the rest of events to the original procedures.

You would have to provide your own mechanism of moving to an appropriate control, depending on which cursor key was pressed but it may be worth the usability gains.

If that worked, you could enumerate all dialog controls and subclass them automatically.

Windows Mobile 6 allows switching between dialog controls using cursors by default - it's a new, more "smartphoney" way of moving around the UI and it's incredibly convenient.

A timer works as well in a dialog-based application as an SDI or MDI app. OTOH, timers are (mostly) a leftover from 16-bit Windows. If you want to do things periodically, a worker thread is usually a better way to do it (and yes, Windows Mobile supports multiple threads).

Edit: in a dialog-based application, the main dialog exists for (essentially) the entire life of the application. Unless you really need the timer during the milliseconds between application startup and dialog creation or dialog destruction and application exit, just attach it to the dialog. Otherwise, you can attach it to the main window -- which MFC creates and destroys, even though it's never displayed.