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.
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I'm trying to rebuild the "Window Snip" functionality from the Microsoft "Snipping Tool"
I know how to get the boundaries of a window by first getting the window handle with p/invoke from the cursors point and after that getting the windows RECT also with a p/invoke method.
The problem I'm facing is that when I'm trying to implement an overlay like the snipping tool does I'm always getting my own applications handle.
I think the problem lies in the way I’m trying to implement that overlay. At the moment I am instancing a new form with the boundaries of the screen, Background is White with 50% opacity. I have a TransparencyKey with the color Fuchsia. My goal is that my overlay is completely transparent for the window where the mouse cursor is. (Like Snipping Tool does) For that I planning to draw a rectangle in Fuchsia with the boundaries of the underlying window to my overlay form (effectively making that spot transparent).
Is there a way to ignore my own window in the p/invoke method? Or is my idea to use a form for the overlay the wrong way to go and there is a simpler way to achieve the wanted behavior?
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?
In my WinRT app I need to draw about 3000 objects on a canvas, where I can translate and zoom the view. Unfortunatley, after adding about 1500 lines to my canvas my Windows 8 App always crashes. What could be the best practice to achieve this?
One solution could be rendering everything on an image (how do I do this?). But then I loose comfort of easy access and editing of every element.
Also my scale and translate is very slow. But since I also need a big overview, it makes no sense to put only the objects of the visible area in the canvas, since on minimum zoom it's still everything and zoomed it's still very laggy cause of add and remove operations.
There are a couple of different things you should employ to have a smooth UX:
Use a Quadtree, whenever you add a shape to your canvas you also put it on your Quadtree. This will be helpful when you will zoom on a portion of the image: you will know what objects are in this portion of the image; you will render them again (against using a cached/pixellated version).
To overcome the potentially lengthy drawing process you could do the following:
display the portion of the cached image overview at the right scale
use a progress indicator to let know the user that the program is working render this portion
when the faint rendering is done, blit it on the screen
A concrete example: Google Maps does that.
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.