Full Screen Image with Transparent System Tray - wpf

The Search Page in Windows Phone 7 (Bing search) is lovely; uses the entire area for a nice piccy. The system bar is transparent but the icons are still there.
I can't seem to reproduce this effect.
If I set an image on the LayoutRoot it only goes up to the bottom of the system tray.
If I hide the system tray, it is always hidden.
If I make the system tray background transparent, I can see the dark/light theme colour (black or white) through it, which looks terrible with the image background in LayoutRoot.
If I try and set the Background of phone:PhoneApplicationPage nothing happens. I tried styling this but couldn't make it work.
I'd be grateful if a Windows Phone 7 guru could help me out here.

Try this:
Set the d:DesignHeight="800" and Background="Transparent" for the <phone:PhoneApplicationPage >
Then for the ApplicationBar,
Set Mode="Minimized" BackgroundColor="Transparent"
Almost similar to the one in Bing Search page, but still a little area at the bottom I couldn't cover.

Related

Change border brush from skyblue in wizard control of extended wpf toolkit

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?

Text on a glass form not appearing right

On a WinForm with an extended borders, when i place a text on the glass area it doesn't appear right.
This is how the text looks like Status
a busy cat http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/4732/95454282.png
![form][1]
how can i fix the text to appear normally?
Text in Winforms is rendered with an alpha of 0. Which makes it transparent when you draw on glass. So you'll see the background color, not the ForeColor you selected.
Drawing text on glass is troublesome, you can't get it easily anti-aliased correctly since the background of the text isn't well defined. Note how the screenshot shows how Windows addresses that problem, the text in the window caption has a milky-white background, thus ensuring that the anti-aliasing properly blends the letter into the background.
Which is what you need to do as well. You get text drawn like that with pinvoke, DrawThemeTextEx() with the DTT_GLOWSIZE flag option. Visit pinvoke.net for the required declarations or use this project. And don't forget to provide a fallback so this window still looks decent on older Windows versions. And newer versions, glass is no longer appropriate for Windows 8.

Flood fill text based on a percentage in silverlight splash screen

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?

Changing the colour of Aero glass for my window?

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.

Silverlight Tutorial Part 6: Using User Controls to Implement Master/Detail Scenarios - How to gray out background?

I am working through the above Tutorial from ScottGu located here (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/pages/silverlight-tutorial-part-6-using-user-controls-to-implement-master-detail-scenarios.aspx) and I am trying to figure how when the UserControl loads, the background page is 'grayed' out like that? Where is that code for that?
I am trying to extract that logic into my own Page / UserControl scenario and when I load the UC, the background is still fully 'visible'. Thanks for any advice!
Under the heading Building a Basic Modal Dialog Using a User Control, Scott's post describes:
"The first control above is configured to stretch to take up all of the available space on the screen. Its background fill color is a somewhat transparent gray (because its Opactity is .765 you can see a little of what is behind it). The second control will then be layered on top of this Rectangle control, and take up a fixed width on the screen."
The Rectangle "grays out" the contents of the screen.

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