Tag: interop

Theming & Visual Styles in Windows 8

The following is based on the Windows Developer Preview and might not accurately represent the final version of Windows 8. A significant change in Windows 8 is the removal of support for Windows classic theming. In the Windows Developer Preview, there is no Windows Classic theme, and all themes (including Windows Basic and the four…

2011-10-24
Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 6 (Notify Icon Position: Pre-Windows 7)

View source on GitHub. In Part 2 of this series I demonstrated how to use the Shell_NotifyIconGetRect function to find the position of a notify icon. This function is new to Windows 7, however, and we must find a different solution for earlier versions of Windows. This turns out to be quite difficult. A post…

2010-12-28
Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 5 (Fixing Aero Borders)

View source on GitHub. An issue that came to my attention only recently is that the borders of WPF (update: WPF is not actually to blame) windows without captions/title-bars (that is, with ResizeMode set to ‘CanResize’ and WindowStyle set to ‘None’) are drawn incorrectly when the DWM (read: Aero Glass) is enabled. Specifically, the upper…

2010-12-20
Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 4 (Multiple Monitors)

View source on GitHub. At the end of Part 3 in this series, I noted that the window positioning logic depends on accurately getting the bounds of the monitor where the notify icon is located. Specifically, we require the bounds of the working area (the space on the monitor excluding the taskbar and other docked…

2010-12-11
Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 3 (Taskbar Position)

View source on GitHub. In the previous post in this series, I showed how to find the location of a notify icon by implementing the new Windows 7 Shell32.dll function Shell_NotifyIconGetRect in managed code for use with the System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon class. In this post, I will look at how to accurately position a window above (or…

2010-12-09
Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 2 (Notify Icon Position)

View source on GitHub. You may have noticed that the notification area applications in Windows 7 (Volume/Power/Network/Action Centre) appear centred above their icon. I wanted Keiki to do the same; the current version is hardcoded to sit in the bottom right of the screen, which causes a few problems: The taskbar position is not taken…

2010-12-08
Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 1 (Removing Resize)

View source on GitHub. Keiki, my OptusNet Usage Meter, is designed to sit in the notification area (or system tray, if you prefer) and behave similarly to the default system ‘applets’ (Volume/Network/Action Centre/Power). That is, the application becomes visible with a single left click on the notify (tray) icon, and is hidden again when focus…

2010-12-07