So that’s where HINSTANCES come from

I realize that this is probably totally trivial for real Win32 developers, but it took me long enough to find this that I’ll blog it and help Google guide future developers.

RegisterClassEx requires an HINSTANCE…I always thought of this as “that thing that is passed to WinMain. Now I realize - it’s a reference to the DLL that the Window Class function is in

So if you’re like me and want to register a class from library code without having that HINSTANCE from WinMain and you’re not using DLLs, you can just use GetModuleHandle(NULL) and call it a day. Easy!