Hello, mIRC scripter!

If you ever tried to create mIRC dialogs calculating all the coordinates manually you’ve already known what a pain it is. There exist some dialog editors for mIRC written in different programming languages but none of them can compete with professional tools by software giants – Microsoft, Borland, Symantec, etc.

Dialog Grabber offers an alternative way to create mIRC dialogs: you design them in your favourite application builder, compile a fake executable and have Dialog Grabber convert them into mIRC dialog tables.

As you may know, DBU stand for Dialog Base Units, the average width and height of a symbol from the system default font. If you change the font of your dialog, DBUs change too.

But not in mIRC.

mIRC DBUs are ALWAYS equal to system default DBUs returned by the GetDialogBaseUnits() WinAPI function. So if you simply copy all the coordinates into a .mrc file, you’ll get a scaled version of your dialog :/

Dialog Grabber therefore has 3 scaling modes:

DBU (mIRC)

DBU (Windows)

Pixels

In the “DBU (Windows)” mode Dialog Grabber doesn’t perform any scaling at all hoping that Khaled will read the WinAPI documentaion some day ;)… In the “DBU (mIRC)” and “Pixels” modes Dialog Grabber tries it’s best to ensure that the converted mIRC dialog will look exactly as the original.

Menus are not supported. It is always a bad idea to use menus in dialogs as they are intended for use with frame windows. Although it’s possible to implement grabbing menus in future.

Icons are not supported. Dialog Grabber calculates coordinates for icons (like “;icon id, x y w h, noborder”) but it doesn’t extract them from the executable. You need to add the “filename” and the “index” yourself. Again, it’s possible to implement icon grabbing in future.

Tabs are not supported because Windows tab controls are different from mIRC ones – they do not “contain” other controls.

Dialog Grabber is shipped with the source code (Visual C++ 6.0, look for the “Dialog Grabber Source Code” folder). You are free to modify it for your own use but please don’t be lame enough to release “next versions” of Dialog Grabber yourself. Contact me, I don’t bite. I’ll review your changes and may accept them.

This is a beta version of Dialog Grabber. It may be buggy and unstable, it may not work on Windows NT/2000, etc… but doesn’t “beta” mean “beta than nothing” ;) ?

Here are my addresses:

necroman@europe.com, Undernet: #mIRC, #mIRCScripts

…and my best wishes.

Necroman