Hop on a Windows 7 machine and open Notepad for example. Drag the window all the way to the left. You'll notice Windows throws up a glass window on the left half of the screen to indicate docking. However, you'll notice this is not your normal Aero glass window. The glass is a lot clearer and has 45 degree "stripes" running across it. I need to duplicate this window's look EXACTLY (or to an indistinguishable level).
I get its a popup window
I get it takes the height of the screen
I get it takes half the width of the screen
The portion I need to duplicate is the look of the clearer glass and the 45 degree "stripes". The normal glass look is not close enough.
Seems like they are taking a normal aero window, making it semi transparent (not glass) and putting a semi transparent overlay on top of it.
I used reshacker to look at the aero.msstyles dll and found the png that I think they are using for the overlay (image #900), but I can't seem to get it to stretch the same way or look remotely similar.
Any thoughts?
Related
I'm actually having 2 different flickering issues:
(1) When I create a form with border style set to none, anytime I resize the window there is a good amount of flickering along the edges of the form. This is especially noticeable if I try to resize the form from the top left corner.
(2) When I minimize the form and restore it from the taskbar, for a (very) brief second in the top left corner where the title would normally be you can see a rectangle shape flicker. I think this might be normal windows behavior but it has just become more noticeable due to WPF removing the windows minimize/maximize animations. If I can't fix the flickering directly this way, is it possible to restore the min/max animations without using hacky solutions such as setting the bordersize just before the form minimizes?
Thanks for reading!
I was fighting the same issue you mention in #1 and it is not specific to borderless WPF forms (though it appears to be dependent on both draw timing and window styles, both of which may change when you change border types). It happens with native apps and apps with full borders as well.
In Windows 10 you can actually see the same type of flickering in Windows Explorer itself when you use the left and/or top window borders.
From my investigations there appear to be at least two overlapping causes, one that dates from pre-Aero days and one that was added on top by Aero. The pre-Aero cause has a workaround but the Aero one still only has a partial solution. Please see this roundup Question/Answer which brings together 10 years of posts on this topic and offers some new insights (too long to paste the content here in this question). Enjoy:
How to smooth ugly jitter/flicker/jumping when resizing windows, especially dragging left/top border (Win 7-10; bg, bitblt and DWM)?
Yes, I know on SO the convention is to mark the original question as a dup rather than linking from one question to another, however this case is a bit unusual. My roundup post refers to more than 30 questions on this topic and brings together the most important ideas from them, but it does not include all the ideas from the original questions...that would be impractical. So I don't actually want to see the original questions marked as dups, nor mine, since either way, useful info would be lost. That is because window resize is a broad topic; this Q covers some aspects, my Q covers others.
So here is my form onstartUp event code:
int height = Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Height;
int width = Screen.PrimaryScreen.Bounds.Width;
this.StartPosition = FormStartPosition.Manual;
this.Size = new Size(width, height);
this.WindowState = FormWindowState.Maximized;
the code works fine and the form starts up maximized. After distributing the applications to the user. A user complained and sent a screen shot with the form buttons on the RHS not appearing on the screen!!!
I figured what the problem is, but i don't know how to fix it. The problem is with windows fonts, Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display\ font size on the development machine is small, on the customers it's medium.
how to accommodate for this in code?
The problem is with windows fonts
Not exactly. It is not the font size you are changing, it is the video adapter's dots-per-inch (DPI) setting. The legacy setting is 96 dpi, since Vista it got a lot easier to change this setting. Common other choices are 120 dpi (125%) and 144 dpi (150%), they are directly accessible from the Display applet with a radio button.
Monitor resolutions have been stuck for a very long time, ducking Moore's Law for a good 30 years already. That's finally changing, in no small part due to Apple's push for "retina" displays. The latest MacBook Pro has 2560 x 1600 pixels on a 13 inch screen, about 230 dpi.
That does come with a problem, any program that creates a, say, 1024x768 window has its UI turned into a postage stamp on such a display. The UI just becomes unusable without a magnifying glass. What is needed is for such a program to become aware of the video DPI setting and create a larger window, proportionally larger by the increase of the DPI setting compared to the way the window was originally designed.
This is automatic both in WPF and in Winforms. WPF gets it by default since all of its locations and sizes are expressed in inches, with a unit of 1/96". Winforms still works with pixels, but it has automatic scaling built-in through its AutoScaleMode property.
Which is what is happening on that user's machine, he's got the video DPI setting at a larger value than your machine. However, without also having a larger number of pixels available on his screen. Somewhat typically picked by someone that has a vision impairment, a side-effect of increasing the DPI setting is that fonts get larger and thus easier to read. But with the inevitable problem that any controls that you put near the right and bottom edge of your window are going to fall off, the screen just isn't big enough.
You address this kind of problem by making your window layout adjustable. Or in other words, by making your UI design work with any window size. A very common feature of Windows programs. Just try it on Visual Studio. Drag the bottom right window corner around and observe how it deals with having less space available but still staying usable. Lots of Winforms features to help you doing this, like the Control.Anchor and Dock properties, FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel controls, the Resize event for tough cases.
The Q&D fix for this is the Form.AutoScroll property. Set it to True to permit the UI to still be usable, the scrollbars allows the user to still get to controls that are off the window.
The code you posted has nothing to do with the problem. You designed the form in a higher screen resolution than the screen resolution of the user and didn't consider docking/anchoring the controls inside the form.
I'd like to implement a similar screen clipping functionality to that of OneNote. Basically it can draw a translucent overlay on top of the whole screen, and also freeze the screen so users can clip a portion of it.
I've done some research around and it seems that the easiest way is to create a translucent TopMost form with the size of the whole screen and then perform clipping on this form. This approach, however, is slow. I see some other suggestions about doing a Direct3D hook for drawing overlay, but this is probably too complicated and I'm not sure how stable it is with respect to different Direct3D version. Any ideas how OneNote does it?
I think instead of creating the transparent layer on top of the screen, just grab a screenshot of the whole screen and make it full screen. So users are drawing on a static image not a translucent layer. Since it is a screenshot already, it is already frozen. I think this is how they do it anyway, I doubt an application can simply freeze a screen, they take a photo of it and cover your screen with it, so its as if its frozen.
I am total newbie in .Net programming so be patient, please ;-).
I have problem with resizing window. I want to resize from my app other app's window and take screenshot of it. I do resizing based on this example: http://blogs.geekdojo.net/richard/archive/2003/09/24/181.aspx. But I have a problem. I work on a laptop with 1024x640 pixels screen resolution but I want to resize my window to 1200x1600 px. I can't do that couse display limitations. Is there any tricky solution to resize window for this resolution and take a screenshot of whole window? I've alos tried Sdesk program witch is suggested here: Create Window larger than desktop (display resolution). Any help?
I would suggest you find a way to set a virtual resolution larger than your physical resolution (basically what sDesk does), and then let your application run normally on that large desktop. Depending on your video card, you might be able to configure the virtual resolution directly in the video driver, without using any additional utility.
No it is not possible. In fact you can't resize in any way the windows greater then the display size.
Just try it by position a window in normal mode (not minimized or maximized) somewhere on the left. Grab the right border of it and increase the width till the end of your screen. Now move the window, by grabbing the title bar, some more to the left. Repeat this procedure several times. At some point you're not able to get the window any wider anymore. If you now try to move the window till the right border hits the right side of your desktop, you'll see that the left border is direct at the left desktop side.
When you create a form in .Net it appears as a dialog box in a portrait layout.
No one normally likes to read sideways, or upside down, but I have a very valid reason to rotate the form.
Anyone knows how to do it on Windows Vista with C#?
Does it have to be in WinForms? This is very easy to do in WPF, using rotation transforms. Unfortunately, the WindowsFormsHost integration with WPF does not allow rotation transforms.
EDIT
I understand, now, that the form in question is out of the control of the poster. Writing the control in WPF won't fix the problem.
This would be a bit of extra work, but if you mainly just need the contents of the form to be rotated (and not the entire window including title bar, window controls etc., which I've never seen before), you could instead make an entirely owner-drawn usercontrol that was rotated 90 degrees, and drop it on an ordinary form. You wouldn't even have to adjust your drawing of everything, since you could do a RotateTransform on your Graphics object and then draw everything normally.
Or if you need the entire form rotated, you could make the form borderless and then do basically the same thing, drawing the title bar and windows controls yourself also.
Update: here's a link to an MSDN article that shows how to rotate the entire screen in C#:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms812499.aspx
This is for regular Windows (not Windows Mobile), so it should work for your porpoises, although it will rotate all of Windows and not just your application's form. Depending on how fast this works and your overall needs, you could rotate the screen 90 degrees when your application gets the focus, and then rotate it back to normal when your app loses focus.
Update 2: I just reread your question and comments. You're talking about rotating the window of a separate application in a separate process, so WPF will definitely not help you here. The MSDN link might be what you need. In your application, you would rotate the screen 90 degrees, then start the other application in a separate process. This would work best if you could force the separate application's window to be maximized, which you can do by P/Invoking the FindWindow and SendMessage APIs (you could also make the window always on top, which would put your computer into a sort of kiosk mode for this application). There's a version of the Process code that basically makes starting another application a blocking call, which means your app will wait for the shelled application to close before resuming. Once the app closes, you can put the screen back to its normal orientation.