Modeless Interaction

hen designing your application, try to ensure that it is as interactive and nonmodal as possible. Here are some suggested ways of doing this:

• Use modeless secondary windows wherever possible.
• Segment processes, like printing, so you do not need to load the entire application to perform the operation.
• Make long processes run in the background, keeping the foreground interactive. For example, when something is printing, it should be possible to minimize the window even if the document cannot be altered. The multitasking support of Windows provides for defining separate processes, or threads, in the background.

Note
For more information about threads, see the documentation included in the Win32 SDK.