How To Hide the "Connected to" Dialog Box When Using RasDial

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On Windows 95, you can hide this dialog box, after it momentarily appears, by using the FindWindow and ShowWindow APIs in a worker thread.

1. Create a worker thread immediately before you call the RasDial API.
2. Have the worker thread periodically call the FindWindow API (perhaps every few seconds), passing into it the name of the "Connected to ..." dialog box. This name is the concatentation of the string "Connected to " and "MyConnection", where "MyConnection" is the RAS phonebook entry name for the phone number being dialed via RasDial. Assuming a RAS phonebook entry named XXX, the call to FindWindow would look like the following:

   hRasWnd = FindWindow(NULL, "Connected to XXX");

3. When FindWindow successfully returns a window handle, pass that window handle into ShowWindow and specify the SW_HIDE parameter to hide the dialog box. For example, assuming hRasWnd is a valid window handle returned from a successful call to the FindWindow API, the call to the ShowWindow API would look like the following:

   fStatus = ShowWindow(hRasWnd, SW_HIDE);

4. Exit the worker thread.

Note that appropriate precautions must be made to exit the worker thread for the case when the connection is never established.

Also, if the name of the phonebook entry is too long, the dialog box will truncate it. In this case you can either rename the entry to a shorter name or use a completely different technique of enumerating all windows and searching for the window that matches the beginning of the title.