A new feature in Windows 8 is ‘storage spaces’, a kind of software RAID, similar to the drive extender functionality found in the defunct Windows Home Server. Unlike Windows Home Server, however, Windows 8 provides no means of removing hard drives from simple (no resiliency) storage spaces, even when there’s adequate free space. Deleting the …
Category Archive: Windows
Mar 27
Native Tooltips in WPF (Part 2)
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 you’ll have to make …
Mar 16
Native Tooltips in WPF (Part 1)
<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 point in the future …
Mar 16
WPF ToolTip Drop Shadows in Windows 8
The standard ToolTip control template for the Windows 8 theme in WPF (‘Aero2’) has no drop shadow, whether or not the HasDropShadow property is set. The background colour and margins are also slightly off compared to the native style. The following template produces a result that’s closer to the real thing: <Style TargetType="{x:Type ToolTip}"> <Setter …
Jan 05
Retaining DPI/PPI Information with PNGGauntlet
I’ve mentioned PNGGauntlet many times on this blog – it’s a great tool for squeezing the best compression ratios out of the PNG format. It combines the tools PNGOUT, OptiPNG and DeflOpt in a nice WinForms GUI. As part of the compression process, most chunks are removed by default. This includes the pHYs chunk, which …
Jan 05
Image Background Remover Tool
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 white images by right-clicking …
Jan 04
Windows Update Notification Tool for Windows 8
I was apparently part of the 5.82% of Windows 7 users who preferred to be notified about updates rather than have them installed automatically. Annoyingly, Windows 8 no longer displays the familiar balloon tip and notify icon when new updates are available, instead placing a notice on the lock screen (which I almost never have …
Jan 04
Pixel-perfect Multi-DPI Images in WPF (Part 3)
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed the problem of displaying different bitmap images at different DPIs in WPF. In Part 2, I proposed a solution using multi-frame TIFFs and two simple markup extensions. In this final post I will present a basic program that takes multiple images (PNG recommended), gives the option to …
Jan 03
Pixel-perfect Multi-DPI Images in WPF (Part 2)
See also: Part 1 and Part 3. In Part 1 of this series, I explored the issue of displaying pixel-perfect bitmap images in the Windows Presentation Foundation. In this article, I’ll describe a method of displaying different images depending on the system DPI setting using a custom Markup Extension and multi-image TIFF files. Tagged Image …
Jan 03
Pixel-perfect Multi-DPI Images in WPF (Part 1)
See also: Part 2 and Part 3. I’ve written previously about DPI-awareness in the Windows Presentation Foundation and how to specify measurements in pixels rather than Device Independent Units (DIUs). Something else to consider is image scaling – unlike the Windows Ribbon control or WinRT, WPF has no in-built mechanism for displaying different images according …