Delphi: Showing the Control Panel window or running a Control Panel applet

Showing the Control Panel window or running a Control Panel applet

Showing the Control Panel window

To show the control panel window programmatically you have to run the rundll32.exe application (located in the Windows directory) passing it shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL as the parameter, as you can see in the following source code example:

uses ShellAPI;

...

ShellExecute(Form1.Handle, nil, 'rundll32.exe',
  'shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL', nil, SW_SHOW);

Opening a Control Panel applet

To open an applet is almost the same as opening the Control Panel, but you have to add the name of the applet file as an extra parameter (these files are located in the System directory and have a .cpl extension). The following example would open the Multimedia applet by code:

ShellExecute(Form1.Handle, nil, 'rundll32.exe',
  'shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL mmsys.cpl', nil, SW_SHOW);

You can specify the tab initially shown in the applet window. The following example would open the Multimedia applet initially showing the Video tab (numbers start from 0 and Video is the second tab so it's number is 1):

ShellExecute(Form1.Handle, nil, 'rundll32.exe',
  'shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL mmsys.cpl,,1', nil, SW_SHOW);