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Tag: winforms

  • Image Background Remover Tool

    View source on GitHub. Inspired by Window Clippings, my preferred screenshot tool (which unfortunately crashes a lot under Windows 8 RTM), I wrote a small program for making image backgrounds transparent. It comes with a command-line interface and a basic GUI (pictured above). The GUI supports dragging-and-dropping images, and you can switch the black and…

  • Facebook Messenger for Windows is not just for Windows 7

    Facebook recently launched ‘Messenger for Windows’, a desktop client for Facebook chat. The Messenger for Windows help page suggests that the program requires Windows 7: What kind of computer operating system do I need in order to use Messenger for Windows? You can set up the app if you use Windows 7 on your computer.…

  • 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…

  • 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 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…

  • 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…