Tag: uxtheme

  • Theme Colours in Windows ‘Blue’

    As I noted in my earlier post, the method for selecting theme (‘accent’) colours in Windows ‘Blue’ build 9364 has changed from Windows 8 RTM. I’m not going to bother looking too closely at the updates to the functions in UxTheme.dll this early in the development process, but I did notice two new registry values…

  • Native Tooltips in WPF (Part 2)

    View source on GitHub. In part 1 of this article I looked at the differences between WPF tooltips and ‘native’ (Win32) tooltips. In this part I present a sample WPF application that displays native tooltips. I’d planned to walk through some of the code here, but that turned out to be a bit tedious, so…

  • Native Tooltips in WPF (Part 1)

    View source on GitHub. <preamble> One of my hobbies is getting WPF controls to look more like their native counterparts. I’ve been shoehorning the UxTheme APIs (and older equivalents when theming is unavailable) into something that can be used by WPF over the past year or more, and I’ll write about this process at some…

  • Retrieving Windows 8 Theme Colours

    See also: Windows 8 Theme Colours Reference. Windows 8 doesn’t offer developers access to system theme colours, unlike its cousin, Windows Phone. Even for a version 1 product, this seems like a strange omission. Then again, we still don’t have a working public API for retrieving the Aero glass colour (or whatever we call it…

  • Keiki Usage Meter 3.1.0 Released

    I’ve released an update for Keiki Usage Meter. There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work, but the user experience hasn’t changed drastically. Visit the website to find out what’s new. I’m using this program as something of a testbed for some engineering work that I’ll talk about in future posts, including supporting pixel-perfect bitmap…

  • Drawing non-themed push buttons in Windows

    When visual styles are enabled in Windows, one may use the DrawThemeBackground function to draw themed push buttons. However, users of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 can disable visual styles by selecting the Windows Classic theme or one of the High Contrast themes (and in Windows 2000 and earlier, visual styles weren’t available…

  • 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…

  • Windows Theme Fonts

    View source on GitHub. Update: See this post for a sample implementation in WPF. Have you ever wondered how to access the various font colours and styles found throughout Windows, such as that of the ‘Main Instruction’ text in the Task Dialog shown above? If you are using WPF, the SystemFonts class might sound promising…