I am building an itunes add on. One of the specification is to make sure that the add in starts up as itunes starts and re-size itunes in a way that the two applications will be visible to the user. This has already been implemented by the popular itunes add in called Music tune up (http://www.tuneupmedia.com/). Ideally, my application would mimic musicTuneUp and, when loaded, it would look like this image
Does any one knows how I could do this. I am implementing my application in C# windows form.
Related
How does one create a desktop application for Windows 10 that is always on the Desktop?
Like Widgets behaved. That is, having "always on top" when you go to "Show desktop" but not on top of other windows all the time.
So the application behaves like a desktop background if that makes sense.
Here's how you could achieve it
Learn how to use WinForms or UWP so that you can create the different widgets with a user-friendly UI. Microsoft has an additional tool called Microsoft Blend, you can create good user interfaces with it.
Read about C# and how it works. You can program the functionality to make the Widgets stay on your desktop and not disappear when clicking the bar on the bottom right of your taskbar.
You might need to google a lot of things until you are ready to do it.
Look at examples
WinWidgets is an open-source widget project hosted on GitHub by me. You can clone the repository and take a look at how it works.
It covers your requirements and I'm sure you can learn how to do it on your own if you give it a shot.
I've searched a lot these days to find a way to programmatically hide or disable the start button in Windows 8.1, but could not find any useful information
Is there any way to do this? Either with C# or with some registry-keys...
A short explanation why I need to hide the button:
We have a .NET Desktop Application which runs on WinXP, Vista and 7 in a self-made kiosk mode. Now we have to get it running in Win8 (8.1) but as expected, the new Start-Menu (Metro, Modern UI, whatever you call it) is always there.
I already managed to disable the Hot Corners, but the Start Button in the left corner still appears when you move you mouse over it, and it also starts the Metro - what we don't want.
Any help would be appreciated!
It seems that there is no such way...
But you could use a third party tool like one of these http://lifehacker.com/how-can-i-hide-the-start-button-in-windows-8-1-1478012124.
This question belongs on SuperUser, since it's not code related, but I'll have a go at it.. You should create a system account with an assigned access. Here, read these two articles: first second
According to these articles, it shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes to achieve what you want.
... find a way to programmatically hide or disable the start button in Windows 8.1...
See Registry Key Controlling Start Button in Windows 8.1? on SuperUser. According to one commentor, there is no simple fix like a registry key. Tools like 7+ Taskbar Tweaker inject a DLL into explorer hook/subclass/redirect some of its methods.
If you are going to write your own DLL and inject it into Explorer, then you might want to take a look at Microsoft's Detours Library. I've used it in the past and its actually easy to use. The description from the website: Detours intercepts Win32 functions by re-writing the in-memory code for target functions. The Detours package also contains utilities to attach arbitrary DLLs and data segments to any Win32 binary.
I'm making a C# windows application, in which I've embedded a Windows Media Player in my form.
Now, instead of using the player in a normal way, I want to access its buttons, for e.g I want to hide its "Play" & "Pause" button.
In short, I want to customize the player according to my needs.
How can I do so?
You will have to hook the creation of the app. Mainly the windows mesaage WM Create or WM Paint.
There You have to check which window names the corresponding controls have. There are several tools to examine such things during runtime, which all use the windows hooking mechanism. However, I think this will fail for metro apps. You must read about hooks . Check codeproject.com for that, because You also will need to create at least one dll. And there is a good example in c, which surely can be ported to c#.Can I give You furthrer info?
I want to write a desktop gadget that will group icons on my desktop (using c# & WPF).
It will be a docked window that I can drag icons to it and they will stay their. Also there can be couple of this windows.
Where do I begin?
**I saw all the post here about it but I got lost. Please direct me to examples and explanation pages.
To expand on cevik's answer:
You cannot create WPF applications as gadgets BUT you have two options (which aren't as bad as you'd expect).
The reason is that widgets are composed mainly of web pages (HTML) and not executable (*.exe).
The problem of course is that WPF will only work with & produce executables.
First option - Windows API:
When I said you can't what I really meant is you can't use the Windows Vista/7 gadget platform to make your widgets.
However, you can always achieve a similar effect by using the Windows API.
The Windows API will let you do stuff to windows such as making them always on the background of other programs, which sounds to me like ~80% there (The rest would be stuff like making sure your window doesn't get re-sized or minimized, etc.).
Just as a note, the function you'd be looking for to make the window behind all other windows would be SetWindowPos (specifically the second parameter).
However make sure there isn't a library which already implements these stuff because it can be rather difficult (and consist of A LOT of surprises).
Second option - Silverlight
silverlight can be perceived as WPF for the web.
That obviously solves our problem.
However there is a cost to it, as expected.
Silverlight doesn't have all the features WPF has (possibly not all of the .NET framework as-well, not sure about that as I'm not really using it).
However it should be more than enough to get you by so you should definitely check it out.
Once you have your Silverlight application (and webpage) you'll have to create a manifest & install the gadget to your desktop. See here how to do so.
Maybe this will help you.
Template to easily get started on developing a Sideber Gadget using Silverlight 3.0 or 4.0 controls in C#.
After playing quite a bit of Bad Company 2 over the last month, I'm getting kind of tired of Alt+Tabbing out of my game to change the song on iTunes. I've got a fairly good iTunes controller library already built for a previous project I was working on, and I'd like to create a WPF application mimicking the BC2 UI that would overlay the game when pressing a shortcut key, much the same way as the Steam Community overlay.
The only problem I foresee is getting my application to overlay BC2 when the user presses a specified shortcut key in-game. Is there a way to intercept a keypress from BC2 (or, really, any Win32 application) and use it to bring my app to the foreground?
In order to have a global keyboard shortcut, you need to use a Hook.
Here is a tutorial showing how to do Keyboard Hooks in C#.
That being said, doing the overlay may be difficult, depending on how the game is written. Many full screen games cannot (easily) have other programs run in front of them. I'd play with making sure that works correctly in your specific game first.