A HWND without a Window

I'd like to create a HWND to process messages (to give to Winsock applications). I'd like to use as little memory as possible.

http://www.codeproject.com/internet/winsockintro03.asp

Does that article help you at all? What you're asking about is having a message pump, but without a window. You can't really have a HWND without a window, but you can create a window that simply never appears. However, before you go through all that trouble, why not see if that article helps :) If not, post a reply and we'll see what we can do.

I know Winsock, and that's a nice article, I could still learn stuff from it (like command line arguments). I've built a few client/server programs before, but this is how my newest app will work.

The program loads a DLL. The DLL does all the work, including intercepting the Winsock Messages it wants.

It would be kinda messy if the user had to code the messages in their own WinProc, plus then it would be limited to Windows and GUI apps.

Did I understand you well, that you are the author of that Dll?
Then may ::GetActiveWindow() help you. It retrieves the HWND of the thread's active window.

As my understanding u have a dll which deals with socket sending and receiving and u want to pass a HWND to ur dll to get intercept when any message is received or want to send a message.

Why u did not use function pointers, set your OnReceive function pointer in ur dll and get your dll's OnSend function pointer in ur code. and its not limited to GUI or HWND.

I don't know if I understood you:
Do you want the HWND to process the winsock notifications from WSAAsyncSelect() ?
If you don't have a window you can also use event objects with WSAEventSelect() and create a thread which waits for the events.

I want to create a HWND inside the DLL for use with the DLL.

I don't want the person using the DLL have anything to do with passing a HWND, because I might port this to Linux, or it may be a Win32 console app.

For that reason, I need to create my OWN HWND.

Do you need an HWND or are you just looking for asynch (non-blocking) sockets so you can do other things while waiting for a receive? If so, you can do that with winsock. Do a search for: select winsock asynchronous

the select function will probably get you what you want without requiring a window. In fact, if you do some research and see that it will get you what you want (without requiring a HWND) I'll attach a TFTP (trivial file transfer protocol) server/client I had to do back in college. It's pretty, well, trivial, so it might help you see how it's done :)

I know about ASYNC Winsock, as I've used it in a couple apps now.

I also will probably use a timer, and maybe other things I might need one for.