Displaying a ProgressBar Control in Marquee Mode

The Windows progressbar control supports a marquee mode that is not available in the .NET Framework 1.1 Windows Forms wrapper around this control. A marquee-style progressbar does not display progress, instead it indicates that an operation is going on by moving some blocks from right to left:

┌────────────────────┐
│    ▓ ▓ ▓           │
└────────────────────┘

System.Windows.Forms.ProgressBar is marked as NotInheritable, thus it’s not as easy to change the progressbar’s style. Instead of writing a wrapper from scratch, only the code used to change the style is shown below:

Private Declare Auto Function SendMessage Lib "user32.dll" ( _
    ByVal hwnd As IntPtr, _
    ByVal wMsg As Int32, _
    ByVal wParam As IntPtr, _
    ByVal lParam As IntPtr _
) As IntPtr

Private Const WM_USER As Int32 = &H400

Private Const PBM_SETMARQUEE As Int32 = WM_USER + 10

Private Const GWL_STYLE As Int32 = -16

Private Declare Auto Function GetWindowLong Lib "user32.dll" ( _
    ByVal hwnd As IntPtr, _
    ByVal nIndex As Int32 _
) As Int32

Private Declare Auto Function SetWindowLong Lib "user32.dll" ( _
    ByVal hwnd As IntPtr, _
    ByVal nIndex As Int32, _
    ByVal dwNewLong As Int32 _
) As Int32

Private Const PBS_MARQUEE As Int32 = 8

⋮

Dim cs As Int32 = _
    GetWindowLong(Me.ProgressBar1.Handle, GWL_STYLE)
SetWindowLong( _
    Me.ProgressBar1.Handle, _
    GWL_STYLE, _
    cs Or PBS_MARQUEE _
)
SendMessage( _
    Me.ProgressBar1.Handle, _
    PBM_SETMARQUEE, _
    New IntPtr(CInt(True)), _
    New IntPtr(100) _
)

⋮

Public Module Program
    Friend Sub Main()
        Application.EnableVisualStyles()
        Application.DoEvents()
        Application.Run(New MainForm())
    End Sub
End Module