Need a quick suggestion for styling a WinForm. I made it with rounded corners even when re-sized. Now trying to add a close button with a image (ControlBox=false), overlapping or clipped to top right corner. This is what I could end with.
But I wish to make it more like in this example image.
How could I achieve this in WinForm.
Here's the trick : your window doesn't just end with the white part. It extends a little bit further. The close button comes under the 'extra' part. The other sides where the window appears to not be there is actually transparent...or in the case of the image, semi-transparent.
The glow effect is provided by the window. Set the TransparencyKey property of the window to Color.Magenta (its a convention as Magenta is the color least likely to be used in a window). Then set the background image to a white background with a little bit of Magenta in the edges. The Magenta will appear transparent when set as the background image.
Fiddle around with TransparencyKey and you'll understand what I mean
Winforms itself cannot provide this for you without outside manipulation of the windows,
because it still uses win32 windows classes in the background.
If you want transparancy in windows: see articles like:
Cool, Semi-transparent and Shaped Dialogs with Standard Controls
And the method in Win32 to do it:
SetLayeredWindowAttributes
Related
I'm using Wizard control of Extended wpf toolkit package.
I would like to change color of the border. See sky blue in image below:
I tried set broder brush\background to wizard\wizard page\window controls, but it failed.
Anybody know how to change it?
Your assistance is appreciated!
Now that you have provided more info, I can see that your question title does not match what you asking to change. You are not asking to change the color of the border of the Wizard Control, you are asking to change the color of the WPF Window.
It takes some time to get things right, and I highly discourage doing this if you app will be used by people with disabilities, who need high contrast, who customized their desktop to a certain color because of color blindness, and the list goes on...Microsoft has worked very hard to address such issues with the defaults.
BUT...you can change this by restyling your Window Style. You can find plenty of code examples.
Here are two:
Can i set the window border color in WPF?
How can I style the border and title bar of a window in WPF?
I'm building a form with two layers of controls. The bottom layer is a set of Panels with defined properties, one of which is a color different from the form background. The top layer is a set of picture boxes I'm using to display a circle. I've set the PictureBox Background to Color.Transparent, and I've offset it from the underlying Panel by one pixel to get the form to draw the underlying Panel. However, the area around the circle in the PictureBox is displaying the Form Background color, not the panel color. I don't want to draw the circle in the Panel, because I want the circles to move between Panels, and actually look like just a circle that's floating across the form independent of the Panel board underneath. Think of the effect as moving a piece on a board game (you see the peg move across the board, possibly on a diagonal not following the normal game path, then stop in a place on the game).
How can I get the PictureBox to have the underlying Form and panels show through, not just the form background color? I'm using C# Visual Studio 2010, and I'm not a terribly experienced programmer, so a code example would be helpful. An image of the form is at:
http://www.imageurlhost.com/images/salgmpcxvcz830c3flt.jpg
Found a way around the problem. I got rid of the Panels for the spaces in the game, and instead drew them as rectangles on the form's background image.
I think I must be missing something obvious, but I'm unable to find this after several hours of searching. Is there no way to use a PictureBox or other control to contain an image with partial transparent/alpha-blended pixels, and place that over another image and have the blending be based on the image under it?
For example, this produces the results I want:
Place a panel on a form.
Add an OnPaint handler.
In the OnPaint handler draw 1 PNG, then draw another PNG over it, using Graphics.DrawImage for both.
This does not:
Place a PictureBox on a form and set it to a PNG.
Place another PictureBox on the form and set it to a PNG.
Place the 2nd picture box over the first.
...even if the 2nd picture box is just empty and has a background color of Transparent, it still covers the picture below it.
I've read this stems from all winform controls being windows, so by nature they aren't transparent.
...but even the 15 year old platform I'm migrating from, Borland's VCL, had several windowless controls, so it's hard to imaging winforms doesn't at least have some easy solution?
My first example above is one answer, true, but that adds a lot of work when you can only use one big panel and draw all of your "controls" inside of it. Much nicer if you can have separate controls with separate mouse events/etc. Even if not an image control, and a control I have to draw myself, that would be fine, as long as I can just put one image in each control. In VCL they called this a "paint box", just a rectangle area you could place on a form and draw whatever you want on it. Has it's own mouse events, Bounds, etc. If you don't draw anything in it, it is like it's not even there (100% transparent) other than the fact it still gets mouse events, so can be used as a "hot spot" or "target" as well.
The PictureBox control supports transparency well, just set its BackColor property to Transparent. Which will make the pixels of its Parent visible as the background.
The rub is that the designer won't let you make the 2nd picture box a child of the 1st one. All you need is a wee bit of code in the constructor to re-parent it. And give it a new Location since that is relative from the parent. Like this:
public Form1() {
InitializeComponent();
pictureBox1.Controls.Add(pictureBox2);
pictureBox2.Location = new Point(0, 0);
pictureBox2.BackColor = Color.Transparent;
}
Don't hesitate to use OnPaint() btw.
Sorry, I just found this... once I decided to Google for "winforms transparent panel" instead of the searches I was doing before, the TransPictureBox example show seems to do exactly what I need:
Transparency Problem by Overlapped PictureBox's at C#
Looks like there are 2 parts to it:
Set WS_EX_TRANSPARENT for the window style
Override the "draw background" method (or optionally could probably make the control style Opaque).
I want to create a custom splash screen where some text on the page will end up being the progress bar. I need the text to flood fill with color from left to right based on the % loaded. My first thought (since I'm not use to doing this type of UI related stuff) was to have a textblock with the forecolor being trasparent layered over something like a border with its backcolor set and then grow the border control based on the %, but this is such a hack, there has to be something better with all the wonderful things silverlight can do. I had also thought about using a image so I could outline the text, but noticed the image was slow and was the last thing to load on my splash screen.
Any ideas on the right way to acomplish this?
I'm using DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea in my WPF application to get the glass effect. This is working fine. What I'd like to do is change the colour used for the glass -- I'm writing a countdown timer, and I'd like the window to be the normal glass colour most of the time, and then to go red (but still with glass) when the time runs out.
I found this question, which talks about how to apply a gradient glass, and that works fine when picking a different colour. Unfortunately, the borders are not coloured appropriately.
When I turn off the borders by using ResizeMode="NoResize", then I end up with square corners. I'd like to keep the rounded corners.
I looked at creating an irregularly-shaped window, by using AllowTransparency="True" and that works fine, but doesn't look like an Aero glass window. It looks a bit flat.
So: my question: how do I create a window in WPF that looks like Aero glass transparency, but uses a different colour?
I think the only possible way to achieve this is to use a semi-transparent filled border and draw it over the entire window or the part you got the glass. Its a workaround but I guess it's a possible solution since the color of the glass gets defined by the system-user and this setting would overwrite yours.
I'm asking the same question myself.
I haven't found a good solution, though the best I've come across so far is doing the following:
HwndSource.FromHwnd(hwnd).CompositionTarget.BackgroundColor = Colors.FromArgb(100,255,0,0);
Unfortunately this tints the minimize, resize and close buttons, which I would rather avoid.