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Tag: win32

  • 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…

  • When should a program’s UI animations be disabled?

    Modern frameworks like the Windows Presentation Foundation, its relative Silverlight and the upcoming Windows Runtime make it easy to add animations to a program’s graphical user interface. When implemented well, animations subtly improve the user experience and can demonstrate a high level of polish in your application. The Zune client software and Windows Live Messenger…

  • Windows Theme Fonts Redux & Sample Code

    View source on GitHub. In a post earlier this year, I investigated how to retrieve information about theme fonts in Windows. Briefly, the Visual Styles APIs can be used when visual styles are enabled, but values need to be hard-coded (to some extent) otherwise. Andrew Powell commented on my previous post noting difficulties in implementing…

  • 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…

  • WM_DWMCOLORIZATIONCOLORCHANGED doesn’t give the Aero Glass base colour

    From MSDN: WM_DWMCOLORIZATIONCOLORCHANGED Message Sent to all top-level windows when the colorization color has changed. Parameters wParam: Specifies the new colorization color. The color format is 0xAARRGGBB. lParam: Specifies whether the new color is blended with opacity. We receive this message when the Aero Glass colour changes. Unfortunately, the value contained in wParam is not…

  • Small Icon Size & DPI in Windows

    The GetSystemMetrics function in Windows retrieves system metrics and configuration settings. One such metric is the recommended size (width and height) of ‘small icons’: Small icons typically appear in window captions and in small icon view. Another place where small icons show up is the notification area. MSDN contains a guide to Creating DPI-Aware Applications.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…