Simplest way to create a HWND

I need a dummy window in MSVC++, this will never be visible and is created even before the app's main window. It's required by a rendering engine. So I'd rather not have to register a class if possible.

For testing it would be better to make it visible to prove it is there - can 开发者_StackOverflow社区I use a static or a button or something? I've been trying with CreateWindow() but while I am getting a return value, nothing visible is appearing.

I submit my own test code for critique:

HWND dummyHWND = ::CreateWindowA("STATIC","dummy",WS_VISIBLE,0,0,100,100,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL);
::SetWindowTextA(dummyHWND,"Dummy Window!");

It seemed to work...

After CreateWindow you need to call ShowWindow to make it visible.

In the first tutorial of NeHe they describe carefully what you need to do to set up an OpenGL rendering context, and the creation of a window (and HWND) is a part of it. If you need it for something else than OpenGL context I believe the code they present can be easily adopted.