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Home » Programming » Visual Basic » Always-On-Top Form [Sept, 21 1999]

Prologue

Platform : VB 6.

In some cases you need to show your form as an Always-On-Top such as palette window. Always-OnTop form will stay as the top most window in the screen even though it has lost it focus.

We can achieve this by using SetWindowPos(...) API and give HWND_TOPMOST for the hWndInsertAfter parameter.

Implementation

Option Explicit

Private Const HWND_TOPMOST = -1
Private Const HWND_NOTOPMOST = -2
Private Const SWP_NOMOVE = &H2
Private Const SWP_NOSIZE = &H1

Private Declare Function SetWindowPos Lib "user32" Alias "SetWindowPos" _
               (ByVal hwnd As Long, ByVal hWndInsertAfter As Long, ByVal x As Long, _
                ByVal y As Long, ByVal cx As Long, ByVal cy As Long, _
                ByVal wFlags As Long) As Long

Private Sub Form_Load()
    SetWindowPos Me.hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, SWP_NOSIZE Or SWP_NOMOVE
End Sub

Epilogue

To set our Form back to as a non Always-On-Top form we can call SetWindowPos(...) again and give HWND_NOTOPMOST for the hWndInsertAfter parameter.