Most recently, while at my mom's house, a phone call came in and the caller ID popped up in a banner on her TV (Comcast). I've seen a similar functionality when the McAfee brings up a virus warning. It was a translucent popup window with the company logo, message and a button or two.
I'd like to mimic this behavior (via C#). This will event driven. My experience in C# is pretty limited, so I'm still feeling out the different libraries. Are there any ideas on where I should start?
I recommended to use WPF. Create new window, that will popup and set next properties:
WindowStyle="None"
AllowsTransparency="True"
Opacity="0.5" //50% transparent
Topmost="True"
Background property will set color of window.
Place on window any controls what you need.
Create this window and show when some event happens:
YourWindow popup = new YourWindow(/*possible args for message on popup, for example*/);
popup.Show();
To place your window in bottom-right corner, as all popups, use next code in windows Loaded event:
this.Left = SystemParameters.WorkArea.Width - this.Width;
this.Top = SystemParameters.WorkArea.Height - this.Height;
How to make animation of window movement you can read in other questions.
If your app is running in the background, you can simply pop up a window and set it to topmost.
Exactly what you do beyond that is going to depend on what type of UI are using (WPF/WinForms.) WPF makes it easier to build a transparent form, as described here:
http://blogs.interknowlogy.com/2007/06/20/transparent-windows-in-wpf-2/
Transparency in WinForms is a little bit harder, but there are some posts about it:
Partial transparency with C# .NET 3.5 WinForms?
A couple of things you will want to do with your pop-up window:
Disable the minimize/maximize/close buttons
Disable the borders
Just put those in your form so it looks better.
-- Dan
Related
When creating a WPF window with AllowsTransparency="True" WindowStyle="None" and maximizing it via this.WindowState = WindowState.Maximized; the Window gets bigger than my screen.
When setting AllowTransparency="False" i have a border around my Window, but the window won't get bigger than my screen.
In my Case I have a 1920x1080 screen and the window becomes 1934x1094.
On my 1280x1024 screen the window will become 1294x1038.
The Window will become still as big as this, whether or not AllowTransparency is enabled or not, yet with it disabled it works properly.
Setting AllowTransparency before maximizing doesen't work and throws an InvalidOperationException.
How to get a WPF window without a Windows-style border, but yet to maximize properly?
A couple year late to the party but just increase your this.borderthickness for the SizeChanged event like so:
<Window x:Class="MyApp.MainWindow"
ResizeMode="CanResize"
WindowStyle="SingleBorderWindow"
SizeChanged="Window_SizeChanged">
....
Code
....
</Window>
public void Window_SizeChanged(object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e)
{
if (this.WindowState == WindowState.Maximized)
{
this.BorderThickness = new System.Windows.Thickness(8);
}
else
{
this.BorderThickness = new System.Windows.Thickness(0);
}
}
It seems a pretty common issue. It appears you'll have to bind your height and width to the actual height/width of the screen as stated in this StackOverflow post:
Borderless window application takes up more space than my screen resolution.
I hope that solves the issue you're facing.
If you only care about the correct dimensions of your window and have no trouble with the appearance, you can wrap the contents of the window in System.Windows.Controls.Canvas like this:
<Canvas Name="MyCanvas" Width="auto" Height="auto">
...
</Canvas>
Then you can use MyCanvas.ActualWidth and MyCanvas.ActualHeight to get the resolution of the current screen, with DPI settings taken into account and in device independent units.
It doesn't add any margins like the maximized window itself does.
It should work with multiple monitors too.
(Canvas accepts UIElements as children, so you should be able to use it with any content.)
Unfortunately there is no good solution to this other than to make a WindowStyle="None" window without resizing, and handle everything yourself. This means your own maximize/minimize/restore buttons that set the window dimensions to fit the screen. Your own live caption area for dragging. Your own borders with the appropriate cursors. Your own double-click handler to maximize/restore. Your own routine for checking the mouse position against the height of the screen for drag-to-dock. Etc. You get the idea. It's a pain in the neck, but if you do it once at least you'll have it for all future projects. Unfortunately you will lose the "Aero" animations, but alas.
I also want to point out one reason why this issue is very important. In at least some cases, WPF can't make full use of accelerated graphics when windows span two monitors (as they normally do any time a window is maximized). That means performance of D3DImage, as well as any Effect, suffers when the window is maximized. It was happening for me, and many of my users, which is what drew my attention to this issue.
set this property of you window.
MinHeight="100"
MinWidth="100"
Height="auto"
Width="auto"
Hope this will work
I am currently using the following code to allow the user to resize and maximize the window:
Window.AllowUserResizing = true;
Window.ClientSizeChanged += Window_ClientSizeChanged;
with the Window_ClientSizeChanged event handling the changes and re-scaling the drawn images etc.
This allows me to resize the window however much I want and also maximize it using the standard button in the window's handle. I would like to be able to start the application with the window in its maximized mode but can't figure out how to do so. I know I can use graphics.IsFullScreen = true; to show it in full screen mode but I would like to be able to run the program in a maximized, windowed mode. Any ideas?
You can put this code in the constructor to do what you want:
Form form = (Form)Control.FromHandle(Window.Handle);
form.WindowState = FormWindowState.Maximized;
This requires that you add a reference to System.Windows.Forms to your project.
This does have the downside that it actually sets up the graphics device twice on startup. Once in the normal way, and then once again because the window was resized. (Although this all happens before the form is first displayed.)
It has the advantage of being extremely simple to implement.
I'm going to poke around for awhile and see if the initialisation order can be changed...
There really is no simple way to get around this problem, it would seem.
I have a winforms C# application that opens multiple dialog boxes. To suit the style of the application, I have removed the default title bars for each window and created my own (with control buttons and drag-to-move function).
The problem that now faces me is that without a titlebar, the user has no way of telling which window is the 'active' window when they are manually moved apart (so they are not overlapping).
In any windows application (that uses titlebars), when you try to navigate away from a dialog box back to the main program (without closing the dialog box) - it wont let you. The border of the dialog box flashes and you hear a windows error sound. Some kind of equivalent visual feedback would be great without needing to have the default titlebars - and tinting an entire window darker seems like it would do the trick nicely.
Something like this in pseudo-code, which would nicely tint the parent window whilst a dialog is open:
// tint window now
window.ShowDialog();
// un-tint window
I have tried to place a panel covering everything with colour set to 'transparent' (with the intention of later controlling the opacity of the panel) but the transparency does not seem to work. Any other ideas of accomplishing this? Or does anyone have a better suggestion to achieve the same level of visual feedback?
Summary:
Is there any way to tint an entire window, or overlay it with a colour? If not, could anyone suggest an alternate method of making the window appear 'inactive'?
I would suggest you to create a method in forms you want to disable:
void DisableForm()
{
//some fancy color
this.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Khaki;
//and disable all controls owned by form, just to be sure
foreach (var s in this.Controls)
{
((Control)s).Enabled = false;
}
}
and functions which enables back those forms of course.
edit.
also you can set visibility property of controls to false
I am currently working on a windows form application (C# visual studio).
Is it possible to grey out the entire windows screen when a button is pressed?
How can I work that out?
Is it also possible to grey out the entire screen but leaving an ungreyed space in the middle for a message box for showing some text?
Answers to your question:
Is it possible to grey out the entire windows screen when a button is
pressed?
You can put a control like a panel over the entire window and hide it.
In the button event you then make it visible. Set the background of the panel to gray and vary the transparency to adjust it so until your window visibility beneath it looks right.
This will force the window into a "modal mode" without any way out. So you better have logic for undoing this as well.
How can I work that out?
Make sure you have some event such as completion of an event or query to hide the control or the user will never get back into your application again.
Is it also possible to grey out the entire screen but leaving an
ungreyed space in the middle for a message box for showing some text?
That is more complex and to be honest with you I haven't played with WinForm is some time -- instead doing WPF for desktop. You MAY be able to use clipping but you will have to do quite a bit of research into how to do it. Use Google -- it can be your best friend.
easiest way:use XAML pop-up as described below
<Popup x:Name="pop" IsOpen="False" >
</Popup>
For more details visit below link. http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/mahesh/using-xaml-popup-in-wpf/
After this to blur the main grid on eventhandler for the event which shows the pop-up,set the opacity as shown in below C# code
if (pop.IsOpen == false)
{
pop.IsOpen = true;
grdMain.Opacity = 0.4;
}
else
{
pop.isopen=false;
}
I've created a semi-transparent form (60% opacity with black background color) that my app launches, maximized, over the entire screen. Basically, it casts a gray color on the entire desktop.
When the user mouses-over a window on the desktop, I want to get that window's handle (hWnd).
The easy way to do this, which is working for me, is:
Temporarily hide my form (OR, temporarily set my form's opacity to 0.0)
Call [GetCursorPos][1]
Call [WindowFromPoint][2]
Show my form again
The problem with this approach is that my form / the screen blinks, which I don't like.
I've tried to fix this in two ways:
I figure there should be a way to get the hWnd of the window directly underneath my form by calling ChildWindowFromPointEx (passing-in the hWnd of the desktop and CWP_SKIPTRANSPARENT), but it doesn't seem to work. I also played with [ChildWindowFromPoint][4] and [RealChildWindowFromPoint][5] with no success. (P.S. Raymond Chen discusses the differences between these calls, here and it seems to me that ChildWindowFromPointEx is designed to do exactly what I need)
I tried preventing the entire desktop from refreshing (kind of "freezing" the screen momentarily) by using (1) SendMessage(GetDesktopWindow(), WM_SETREDRAW, false, 0) before I hide my form and (2) SendMessage(GetDesktopWindow(), WM_SETREDRAW, true, 0) after I hide my form. This didn't work quite right: some areas of the screen would freeze, some weird black blocks would appear, etc. I do know, however, that (1) does work, because one time I called (1) and didn't call (2) and my desktop appeared completely frozen (had to reboot, even TaskMgr didn't render correctly). I also tried using SuspendLayout and ResumeLayout on my form, but I don't think they are meant to handle my case.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You can do the checking yourself since your need to customise beyond that what the standard functions offer.
Call EnumWindows() to get a list of top-level windows.
Remove your semi-transparent window from this list.
For each window in the list use PtInRegion() to determine whether or not the mouse is over the window. Remove any windows that don't fit the bill.
Use GetNextWindow(), starting from one of the remaining windows to walk the z-order and find out which of the candidates is at the top.