Keyboard Accelerator Fail

I added some new buttons to various screen for a recent change. First steps was to produce a design. I always put screen shots in there so users know what to expect. My boss took a look at my draft screen shots and declared that I needed keyboard accelerators. No problem. Just stick an ampersand in front of the name in the resource editor.

Problem was that the accelerators were just not showing. That's okay. I hacked up a screen shot with them using Microsoft Paint. Made a note to get this fixed during the coding phase. I did notice that when you pressed a key, the accelerators seemed to show up. Weird.

Finally I got down to business. Tried to figure out what was going wrong. OnInitDialog() looked okay. Resources looked okay. WTF is going on? I turned to Google. That got me to Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog. Sure enough. He described why I could not see the accelerators. You don't get the visual cues unless you press the Alt key. This has been so since Windows 2000. This is a "feature" from Microsoft. Great.