So I have a large WPF application, and there is an icon on the taskbar when the application is running. I would expect that if I click the taskbar icon, the application will restore itself, or minimize if it is already showing, as is standard windows functionality. However, sometimes I have to click several times for this to work. I've done quite a bit of research/programming, but this is one fairly simple item I can not figure out. Any help is appreciated, please let me know if I need to provide more info. I have tested using a jumplist, but my users do not want to right click the icon and then click "restore". They just want to left-click the taskbar icon. .Net 4.0, WPF 4. Thanks in advance everyone.
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I'm currently developping an application with Surface SDK running two windows (not hard to reproduce at all).
Problem is : when 1st window is clicked, she has the focus. But when I want to click the 2nd window while first is still clicked, I can't get the focus and interact with this 2nd window.
I think problem is that Windows only gives the focus to one application at a time, so you can't interact with a second window until first click is released.
Do someone know if there is a solution to force windows to interact with 2 applications at the same time ?
Cheers,
Your diagnosis is correct but unfortunately there is no solution. Much of Windows is based on an assumption that only one window has focus. (Source: I lead the team that created the Surface SDK)
A tool such as PluralInput may work for you:
https://pluralinput.com/
I'm not sure that's the right way to say it, but what I want is to for my wpf main window to have it's own bar that will behave like a taskbar, and any children windows that will be open from the main one will be placed in that bar in a similar way like the taskbar works in windows - a rectangle showing the window name for example, on click it opens you the window, if you click minimize it will minimize it to the bar, and with some option, to get it out of the main window and move it to the real windows taskbar, with another option for putting it back in. The problem is I don't know if this is even possible, and I don't know the name of such an element, so if anyone can give me any tips I'll be really thankful.
I worked on an application years ago (.NET 3.0: first WPF release!) that did exactly that. We ran into a lot of issues getting it to work, but we were pretty successful in the end. One thing we didn't support was moving it to the Windows taskbar.
The best option would be to set an attached property on each Window. This would register a Window with your custom taskbar, so if you wanted to move the Window out of your custom bar, you'd set the property to false. Setting the property to true would add it to the collection of application windows, as well as register event handlers to track the state of the Window.
One of the major pain points for us was getting the Window animations correct. If you're not running in XP, this probably less of an issue, as the animations in Vista (or is it 7?) and above aren't really showing where a Window is going on minimize. In the end, we had to do a lot of low level Win32 (p/Invoke) work for this.
Take a look at AvalonDock and WPF MDI:
http://avalondock.codeplex.com/
http://wpfmdi.codeplex.com/
A few of my users are experiencing a strange bug. I have a simple WPF window that contains a few textblocks and buttons. After a short time using my application successfully the users that experience the problem report that the window's content becomes empty and only the border of the window is visible.
After remoting onto their machines I have confirmed that it looks like the content of the window is frozen. When the window first opens it appears like its see through and displays whatever is behind it. If I move the window around the same frozen image of what was behind the window when it opened stays there. If I bring something in front of the Windows (such as a browser) the "frozen image" in the contents will change to a frozen image of whatever was in front of it. I have discovered that the buttons are still active and clickable in the window, so it's not completely frozen it just seems not to be drawing the content properly.
The issue only seems to affect a small percentage of my users and I cannot recreate this issue on any of my test machines. Any ideas about what is happening would be greatly appreciated.
If you have a user that's willing to experiment to find a solution, have them Disable Hardware Acceleration in WPF. If this fixes the issue, then it's most likely a graphics driver problem.
Kinda new to Silverlight and have some experience with WPF but I'm doing a project with a group for a class making a game for WP7. I am currently in charge of the menu system for the game and I had a few ideas for "flashy" menu transitions. I got some going for the main menu but I wanted to do something cool for the options submenu.
Anyway my idea is to either fashion an expander or to have sort of a variation of a dialog box. But the way I envisioned it would be in either case the menu items blur but are still visible while the expanded menu is displayed or while the dialog is active. If I'm being confusing sorry :) but think of Windows 7 glass effect on the menu while other options are available.
What I'm getting at is I want to give this a shot but I have no idea how I would go about doing something like this. Could anyone point me in the right direction or outline some key steps for me to build off?
I tried finding something like this on Google but no such luck.
I would recommend taking a look at the many items available in the Education Catalog over on the AppHub - http://create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/?contenttype=0&devarea=65&platform=54&sort=1
When I have 2 apps open and one has the focus but I want to execute a command in the other app, it requires a click to regain focus and another to execute the command. Is there some good reason why I couldn't take focus on MouseOver? I'm working with a WPF app if that is pertinent. TIA
EDIT: Oddly enough the MouseOvers work without focus.
I would not recommend doing this. This is not a standard way of working in Windows, so you will confuse your users. People are used to clicking into an application (or tabbing) to provide focus.
However, this is a configurable setting via the Accessability Tools in Windows. It can be enabled by choosing "Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse" globally. Let your users specify this behavior if they want it.
The setting is configurable at a system-wide level. You should never ever override the user's current setting regarding this.
MS Windows Vista -- focus follows mouse (There's also a link on how to do it on XP.)
Edit: Normally, you can click a button on a form and both bring focus to the window and click it at the same time. The origins of the current setting "eating" the initial mouse click that brings focus to a window started as a fix to a bug in the Ribbon UI. The discussion is somewhere in this video: The Story of the Ribbon. Sorry I can't narrow it down more than that, but at least the video is a great insight and work watching - maybe you can send a message to Jensen Harris if you need a faster answer.
Edit 2: I just added a button to a WPF window, and I'm able to click it as long as I can see it - whether or not the window has focus.
You can take focus on MouseOver manually