I would happily provide a screenshot of this, however the problem is the captured image, is much larger than my actual desktop.
I am completely frustrated with this as I have tried using BitBlt with the desktop hdc AND the new "Graphics" commands.
My actual desktop resolution is 1920x1080 - 1080p .
BitBlt and "Graphics" both return that my resolution is 1536x864 # 96 DPI.
A form (WinForm), Maximized, borderless, and irrelevant of scaling mode the form is set to, also shows 1536x864 # 96 DPI.
Now the image that is captured, is like it is being done from 1920x1080, but clipping the region 1536x864 as the screenshot.
If I do PrintScreen directly using Prtscn button, I get the entire image, but still it is about 1.5-2x larger than what I actually see.
What I am looking for -- is a resolution for how I can take a picture of what is on my screen in the scale/dpi/whatever is going on here that it visually looks like. I have written a screen capture program, and using a few different examples for the RubberBand form (overlay form to select a region of the screen by drawing a box), and as you can imagine, this scaling crap is causing those box captures to be offset, and the contents are zoomed.
This is very annoying -- even to explain, however I am positive that most of you are familiar with the terms I use, and also know what to expect from taking a screenshot, so my explanation above should be pretty clear as to what my problem is.
Example/Consideration
Imagine, taking a picture of a window that is 300x300, and getting the top left 150x150 of that zoomed to 300x300 completely skipping the remainder of the window. Resulting image is still 300x300, but it's not what you selected.
Now imagine, you grab a picture of your screen by the only dimensions you can get programmatically, and then put the image into a picturebox. Even though both your screen and the picturebox claim to be the same dimensions and dpi, the image in the picturebox requires scrolling even if the picturebox is maximized to fullscreen on a borderless with no borders / etc. -- again, the picture is zoomed, but how is it still reporting that it's the same size as the form XD (comparing Graphics or BitBlt dimensions with the actual form. also tried comparing picturebox contents, and still same effect)
This, is EXACTLY what the effect is that is happening. When I try to capture a region or segment of the screen. I am not sure why windows api/crl is lying about this seemingly trivial stuff, however there must be a way to accurately obtain screenshots/capture regions without this faux zoom effect -- across all resolutions.
Thank you Hans Passant for pointing me in the right direction.
To add "true" dpi scaling support to a winforms application, you can make it so by adding the following block to your manifest :
Project > Add New Item > Visual C# Items > Application Manifest File
One the file has been added, open it up and look for a line like
</asmv1:assembly>
Whatever the "asmv" number is, (in the example above it is 1), use that to format the code:
<asmv1:application>
<asmv1:windowsSettings xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SMI/2005/WindowsSettings">
<dpiAware>true</dpiAware>
</asmv1:windowsSettings>
</asmv1:application>
Paste the above code (changing the asmv1 to whatever version the manifest is), just above the final closing line for the ""
Also, make sure your forms are set to AutoScale to dpi (and all sub-elements).
Related
I'm currently getting back to some Windows Programming using Petzold's book (5th edition).
I compiled the following example using BitBlt and it doesn't work as it is supposed to.
It should copy the Window's icon of (CxSource, CySource) size and replicate it on the whole window's surface.
What happens, in reality, using Windows 7 is that the bitmap below the window gets sourced and copied into the drawing surface i.e. hdcClient.
I don't understand why it behaves like this knowing that it's clear the DC passed to BitBlt is hdcWindow, which refers to a device context obtained via a GetWindowDC(hwnd) of the current application.
I first thought it was due to the fact the transparency mode is enabled by default, but deactivating it doesn't change anything. BitBlt seems to always take the surface below the application Window!
I don't get it! :)
Anyone knows why it works that way and how to fix it?
Making screenshots with BitBlt() did not exactly get any easier since the addition of the DWM (Desktop Window Manager, aka Aero). Petzold's sample code suffers from a subtle timing issue, it is making the screenshot too soon. It does so while Aero is still busy animating the frame, fading it into view. So you see what is behind the window, possibly already partly faded depending on how quickly the first WM_PAINT message is generated.
You can easily fix it by disabling the effect:
#include <windows.h>
#include <dwmapi.h>
#pragma comment(lib, "dwmapi.lib")
And after the CreateWindow() call:
BOOL disabled = TRUE;
DwmSetWindowAttribute(hwnd, DWMWA_TRANSITIONS_FORCEDISABLED, &disabled, sizeof(disabled));
Another tricky detail is that the first BitBlt matters, the DWM returns a cached copy afterwards that is not correctly invalidated by the animation.
This gets grittier when you need a screenshot of a window that belongs to another process. But that was already an issue before Aero, you had to wait long enough to ensure that the window was fully painted. Notable perhaps is the perf of BitBlt(), it gets bogged-down noticeably by having to do job of composing the final image from the window back-buffers. Lots of questions about that at SO, without happy answers.
It is not supposed to copy the windows icon, it is supposed to copy the windows titlebar part where the icon is located.
There are some issues with this (now 20 year old code):
GetSystemMetrics values cannot be used for window related dimensions anymore since GetSystemMetrics returns the classic sizes, not the Visual Style sizes.
Depending on the Windows version, the DWM might define the window size as something larger than your window (where it draws the window shadow and other effects).
Your example works OK on XP:
(There is a small problem because the titlebar is not square (unlike Windows 98/2000 that this example was designed for) so you see a issue in the top left where it is just white. I also modified the example slightly so it varies the HDC source location)
On a modern version of Windows it seems like the DWM or something is not able to properly emulate a simple window DC and parts of the shadow/border/effects area is part of the DC:
I don't know how to fix this but the example is pretty useless anyway, if you want to draw the window icon you should draw the HICON with DrawIconEx. If you want to draw custom non-client area stuff then you need to find more recent examples, not something that only supports the classic theme.
I am trying to resize a window that covers entire screen.
I tried out following
win.Left = SystemParameters.VirtualScreenLeft;
win.Top = SystemParameters.VirtualScreenTop;
win.Width = SystemParameters.VirtualScreenWidth;
win.Height = SystemParameters.VirtualScreenHeight;
This works perfectly on a monitor of 1080p (Full HD monitor). It also works when I have two monitors attached and one of which is full HD where as the other is an HD monitor. I understand that in such case some of the part of the window will never become visible as it will go out of the bounds of total screen asset.
The problem starts with 4k monitor. On a 4k monitor, it consumes a smaller rectangle on screen and does not span to cover the entire screen. I understand that this is due to scaling (wpf automatically scales window) but not able to find a way to overcome this issue.
The issue is just with the 4k monitor. I assume that it has something to do with DPI as the 4k monitor has higher DPI.
My question is, how to make the application use entire screen asset irrespective of monitor resolution and DPI.
(Please note that setting window maximized will not work as it will not span it over multiple monitors.)
It turned out that the issue was not with resizing of window at all. Window was properly resizing after specifying the co-ordinates. However, there is one thing which might help those who want to do similar thing. Always make sure that you compare the values retrieved form API with the other values from API and WPF with WPF as WPF yields scaled values.
To set the icon for a settings window, I use this code:
SDL_WM_SetIcon(IMG_Load("settings.png"),NULL);
settings.png is a 32x32 PNG image with semi-transparency placed in the same folder as the executable. The problem is that the title bar looks like this:
In case you can't see the black on the screenshot above the first time you look, here's a zoomed version of it with an arrow showing an example of the parts that I'm talking about:
As you can see, at the places where there is supposed to be semi-transparency, there is black instead which makes it a bit ugly. I tried to take away the semi-transparency with IcoFx using "Insert new image" and then selecting "True Color (24 bits)" (which takes away the semi-transparency and replaces the image with what it would look like on a white background without changing parts that are totally transparent), but I still get the same result. I also tried reducing the size of the image to 16x16 but that makes it even worse. How do I fix this? If it's possible, I would prefer to keep the semi-transparency since the taskbar supports it just fine.
Other questions on SE address how to speed up nested UI control resizing, but- what if there aren't any controls?
As you drag the edge of a WPF window, even a main window with no content, black bars flicker briefly during the drag. This produces a crummy feel- one that I don't want to inflict on customers:
It does get slower and heavier with a full UI on top of it as well. This doesn't even get into how ugly it looks when resizing using the top or left edges. Windows Forms- even with the heaviest UI I've built- never looks this bad right off the bat.
What can be done to make WPF window resizing performance comparable to win forms?
(I have Windows 7 x64 and a triple monitor system on an AT Radeon HD 7470.)
You could update your graphic card and try it out again but that wont change anything. The reason is pretty simple. We all get to see this sometimes based how fast/slow our computer is. Sometimes it runs smooth because we do not have many visuals to draw. The reason is no proper background color is found in graphic card at that moment in redrawing process. Your drivers are fine, and its not just because you use Wpf. Other techniques use the same mechanism behind redrawing.
The first thing WPF will do is clear out the dirty region that is going to redraw. The purpose of dirty regions is to reduce the amount of pixels sent to the output merger stage of the GPU pipeline. Here is where we see the black color. Window itself at that point has no background color or its background color is set to transparent and so to us the GPU draws the black background. Things run async in wpf which is good so.
To fix this you could set a fix color such as "White" to the Window. Then the WPF system will clean out the dirty region but fill it automatically with white color instead of black. This usually helps.
Match the window color or the color of top most layer. Dont let GPU use black and you should do fine. Btw Wpf is faster than WinForm so dont worry.
The look is crummy indeed, especially when using the top or left border.
Which exact problem your screen shot is showing depends on how long your app is taking to render as well as a couple of background related settings that you might be able to tweak to get better resize. Plus part of the ugly resize is specific to Aero.
While I can't address the specific crazy slowness of WPF redraw, I can at least give some insight on why you see black, where that is coming from, and whether you can change to a less annoying fill-in color.
It turns out there are multiple different sources of the black and the bad resize behavior from different Windows versions that combine together. Please see this Q&A which explains what is going on and provides advice for what to do (again, not specific to making WPF faster but just seeing what you can do given the speed you have):
How to smooth ugly jitter/flicker/jumping when resizing windows, especially dragging left/top border (Win 7-10; bg, bitblt and DWM)?
I am trying to remove the border of my WPF window in the design view/tab in Visual Studio. Please don't mistake this as a request to create a border less WPF window. I did that and it is working fine. What bothers me is that even if you have set WindowStyle = None, ResizeMode = NoResize, the design view/tab still shows a border around your window in the preview.
Is there a way to remove said border and have a 1:1 preview of the border less window as in Windows Forms?
Every question I have found in regards to this only asks how to remove the border of the actual application. I would like to remove it in the preview.
Any help would be very much appreciated :)
here is a screenshot of my problem:
This cannot be done as this is just how Visual Studio renders a window in design view (I think the frame is probably there so that you can distinguish when you are editing a Window rather than a UserControl).
Rather than try and find a solution to this I would ask myself if this is something I need to be spending time figuring out - after all you say that your program works correctly when being run. I think your time will be better spent writing code for your program rather than trying to play with the design time environment.
Update: In response to you comment, consider that the window frame will be different on every users machine depending on their operating system version (XP vs. Win7) or the theme the user has installed.
My computer has XP installed so the side borders are a lot thinner than those shown in design time so any content will be smaller (but only my a few pixels - 4 in my case; does your user interface design really depend on 4 pixels?).
When using a technology such as WPF you should not be designing your UI to fit to exact pixel sizes; you should be designing with min / max values or using layout containers that adjust to the size of the window as set by the user. Any regions in your UI (E.G. sidebar and main content) should be expressed as a ratio or percentage of one another; instead of saying "The side bar is 150 pixels wide and the main content area is 350 pixels wide" you should be saying "The side bar takes up a third of the window width and the main content takes two thirds".
Although the question is very old and have already been answered (kind of), I just realized: if you set WindowStyle="None", your undesired border is gone.