Removing icon from Windows title bars without ditching close button or system menu?

Question

I'm developing an MFC application and I've recently been searching for a good method to remove the icon from a Windows title bar, but retain the close button. The two obvious candidate solutions are turning off the system menu style or using the tool window style, but I would prefer not to disable the system menu or use the shrunken tool window title bar. Many MFC applications have this functionality, so I wonder: am I missing some standard way of doing this?

Answer 1

You can use WM_NCRBUTTONDOWN to detect if the user has right-clicked on your caption and then bring up the system menu.

Answer 2

Set WS_EX_DLGMODALFRAME extended style.

Answer 3

You could use a fully transparent icon.

Answer 4

what about getting rid of the system menu and then putting it back in another place yourseld (say next to the close button etc.)?

Answer 5

Without the icon, the only method I could imagine for users to access the system menu is via right-click of the titlebar.

If that's what you had in mind, you could handle WM_RBUTTONDOWN on your main frame and then calculate if the right-click was on the titlebar.

int clickX = GET_X_LPARAM(lParam);
int clickY = GET_Y_LPARAM(lParam);

CRect frameRect;
mainFrame.GetWindowRect(&frameRect);

int titleBarHeight = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYCAPTION);

if (clickX >= frameRect.left &&
    clickX <= frameRect.right &&
    clickY >= frameRect.top &&
    clickY <= frameRect.top + titleBarHeight)
{
   TrackPopupMenu(m_systemMenu);
}

Answer 6

A sample code in Delphi which removes icon:

const
  WM_ResetIcon = WM_APP - 1;

type
  TForm1 = class(TForm)
    procedure FormShow(Sender: TObject);
  protected
    procedure WMResetIcon(var Message: TMessage); message WM_ResetIcon;
  end;

implementation

procedure TForm1.FormShow(Sender: TObject);
begin
  PostMessage(Handle, WM_ResetIcon, 0, 0);
end;

procedure TForm1.WMResetIcon(var Message: TMessage);
const
  ICON_SMALL = 0;
  ICON_BIG   = 1;
begin
  DestroyIcon(SendMessage(Handle, WM_SETICON, ICON_BIG, 0));
  DestroyIcon(SendMessage(Handle, WM_SETICON, ICON_SMALL, 0));
end;

A similar code should work for MFC. Basically, you just need to WM_SETICON to NULL in the right place.