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 …
Tag Archive: uxtheme
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 …
Jan 02
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 …
Mar 23
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 …
Feb 12
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 …
Oct 24
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 …
Apr 30
Windows Theme Fonts
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 at first. However, this …