UI layout nightmare with WinAPI

I would like to know what should I do with GUI layout under WinAPI/MFC.

In the ideal world I should just create the form/dialog via resource edi开发者_如何学Ctor, and everything should just work. In the real world the dialog editor is ancient behemoth from the ice-age and doesn't support most of the comctl32 controls.

This is where the problem creeps up. Dialog editor uses DLU units, and when I create new controls at runtime, I have to express them in pixel offsets.

I stumbled upon one article about calculating DLUs based on font http://support.microsoft.com/kb/145994/en-us, but also saw a warning somewhere that dialogs can have non system fonts in some circumstances, so this approach is not very safe. Plus the article seems to look only at English characters, without regard to all other characters in unicode space which might be wider?.

Has anyone done a research in this direction and found a better way?

P.S.: No Winforms/WPF/Delphi, requirements.

the dialog editor is ancient behemoth from the ice-age and doesn't support most of the comctl32 controls

It doesn't need to support the controls directly, you can still use it just for positioning by inserting it as a custom control and filling in the window class in the property page. For example, that's how I insert link controls in VS2005: as a custom control with class "SysLink".

MapDialogRect (mentioned in the article) is the function that Windows uses to translate the dialog units in the dialog resource to pixel units. MapDialogRect works (where GetDlgBaseUnits fails) because its given an actual handle to the dialog box, and can send it a WM_GETFONT message to retrieve the actual font the dialog will be rendered with.