>>>Hi all:
>>>
>>>i want to try and show error messages encountered on a form with a flashing title bar. how can i achieve this ?
>>>
>>>sincere thanks.
>>
>>You can do so with a timer and the Caption property of the form, but only the caption will flash not the bar itself.
>
>
>This one is intresting.
>
>Mark I have a question on this one. Can you run the timer to flash the background color to make it seem as though the entire bar was flashing? If so I may be able to use this myself.

You may want to play with the FlashWindowEx() API call to do this; it can handle this and more without resorting to timers through a simple structure.

DECLARE SHORT FlashWindowEx IN WIN32API STRING @ pwfi

this takes a 20 byte string parameter that controls the flash behavior, described in the FLASHWINFO entry in the MSDN. It can control the number of times and frequency of the flash, whether the Window flashes minimized, whether the Window flashes continuously or just until pulled to the foreground, etc. It does not require any pointers to construct.