Tag: aero

  • 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

    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…

  • Early Windows 8 UI Changes

    Some early screenshots of Windows 8 have leaked recently, providing some clues as to what changes we might see in the user interface. User Account Pictures in the Taskbar Two screenshots show a 32×32 px (actually 28×32 px in the second screenshot) user account picture in the taskbar, located between the clock and ‘show desktop’…

  • 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…