I want to open some custom Menu when the user left-clicks on the titlebar and / or the small icon of my WPF Application. The Menu itself must not open within the titlebar or overlay the titlebar! It's only a nice-to-have feature, but not a must. It can open within the Application itself.
I know that this is "easily" possible with creating a custom window in WPF, but i don't want to do this to maintain all the default window behaviour for now and for future windows versions, as my application lifetime is assumed to be several years.
So my question is:
Can i register some Eventhandlers to the MainWindow's Titlebar without changing the default Window style, behaviour and appearance?
Is it possible to mark the captured Events as "used" or "handled"?
Related
In my VSTO projects (Office 2007 / 2010) I would like to use a small popup control (think Tooltip like features; fade animation and mouse interaction).
I would prefer to use WPF. If I were to do this in WPF I would create a custom Popup Control.
In VSTO, as far as I understand it, I must use a WPF window and then have 2 options, either I put this window in a Windows Form Container or I get the Hwnd of my office app and I add this Hwnd to the Owner property of a WPF Window. Am I correct here?
Creating a whole window, animating it on and off the screen etc to look like a ToolTip seems to be overkill.
So my question is how should I do this. I would prefer WPF.
I don't know if this would work but my first thought is to build a very tiny WPF window which is transparent and start it with the Office App. I can then build a Popup Control (which is a child of this tiny window) which I show and not show at a mouse position. Pretty sure a popup can appear outside the bounds of its parent window.
Just wanted to tidy up my own question with what I did. In the VSTO addin project I added a reference to WindowsBase, PresentationFramework and presentation core.
And then I just follow any tutorial or example that adds a WPF Popup. By popup I mean a System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.Popup. For the Placement I used PlacementMode.Absolute and then used a window point to set its position.
This pretty much answers my question. Of course this popup is literally floating above your office window so you will need to make sure that you control it for example if the office window moves, is minimized and the like.
I have a problem that appears to be new to Windows 10.
I want to create a form that is visible to the user, but with no task bar icon and that does not appear in Alt+Tab.
This is perfectly doable if one is happy to sacrifice the normal styling of a window by following the accepted solutions here for either WPF or Windows Forms.
The general advice for both WPF and Windows Forms is:
Set ShowInTaskbar to false
Enable the ToolWindow styling (either through setting the border style in WinForms or the WindowStyle in WPF)
However, this has a new, practical problem in Windows 10 when using Virtual Desktops: the moment you do the above, the WPF or WinForms window will appear in every virtual desktop. See my example application with a red background:
This affects both the Task View switching screen and the actual desktop itself. No matter where you go, the form is there!
Is there any way to show a form - or even just a bitmap - on Windows without anything appearing in the taskbar, without anything appearing in Alt+Tab and without duplicating the window on every virtual desktop?
I have spent two days researching every possible option, trying every example online, reading MSDN documentation on window styles etc. but all resort to the same method, either through P/Invoke calls or directly, but either way the result is the same.
I am docking another application's window inside of my WPF window using HwndHost. To do this, I have to set the WS_CHILD style attribute of the window I am docking and I lose the system menu of that window which is not acceptable. Using HwndHost there is no way around this since it will throw exceptions if that attribute is not set.
My question is;
Since my application doesn't use a system menu, is there any way to directly copy the system menu of the docked application to my app's window? The WinAPI menu functions I'm aware of would all require me to build up the menus from scratch and I don't know how I could hook those menu into the hosted application.
I'm not sure if it matters, but the two windows are within the same process. My application is a plugin of the application window I am docking.
Use GetSystemMenu to get an HMENU for the system menu for the given window. You should be able to cross-reference your own window's system menu with the docked application's system menu, copy across any that your own window doesn't have, and forward them on by handling and forwarding the relevant WM_SYSCOMMAND messages. Or maybe just copy the whole system menu and forward all of them on.
This will probably require a bit of trial and error to make it all work (especially if the docked application isn't expecting to be used this way...) but the above might help get things started.
Is the stuff that is displayed when you create a GUI with WinForms or WPF still based on the native controls like Common Controls or any of the system provided Window Classes or is everything that is displayed "custom" drawn by the framework?
Note: I'm not talking about stuff like a file dialog, but GUI that was actually implemented with WinForms or WPF.
And yes, this is purely out of interest.
User HighCore commented:
WPF Uses an "HWND" for the Window objects, but then all other objects
(Controls) inside the Window are WPF objects not related to Win32 in
any way, wheareas AFAIK, winforms uses a separate HWND for each UI
element.
And indeed, using Spy++, we can observe the following when we create a test app with a simple dialog/window and a button on it:
MFC/native:
The app window is a Window (HWND) with the Window Class of #32770 (Dialog) (I used a "Dialog based" app.)
The Button is a separate Window (Class: Button)
Windows Forms:
The app window has the Window Class WindowsForms10.Window.8.app.0.2bf8098_r20_ad1 (oh my)
The Button is a separate Window (Class: WindowsForms10.BUTTON.app.0.2bf8098_r20_ad1)
WPF
There's only one top level Window, although for good measure I added a ComboBox, a ListBox, and a Menu to this window in the UI designer.
The Class of the only Window is: HwndWrapper[WpfApplication1.exe;;9b1aec0f-1b88-419c-8730-858906314cd9]
The Window Class names are actually quite interesting: With the MFC/native one you get the classes known for years and documented on MSDN. With Windows Forms, it does appear that it always uses the same class names. And with WPF it seems the name of a Class of a Window also incorporates the executable/process name.
So apparently MS thinks that using more than one Window per window isn't necessary anymore. I think I need to open a second question for that.
Windows Forms uses native controls for some UI elements. WPF draws everything on its own.
Is there a difference between window and user control? It seems to me that these two are exactly the same. So which one should I use and when?
(I tried googling this phrase and I couldn't find anything)
A Window is as the name suggests a window, it can be closed, minimized, resized etc. This should be quite intuitive.
A UserControl on the other hand is a composite component/module which can be placed inside other controls and is itself made up of controls (possibly even other UserControls), the main use for UserControls is reusability, encapsulation and loose coupling, some applications can be broken up into a set of UserControls of which each one provides a certain functionality.[citation needed]
We make user control if we want to reuse it. As name says User Control it means some control like grid,combo box like that.If i need same grid on 3-4 windows then i will prefer to make it as User Control.If it is not reusable i will define my grid in the required window.At last you paste your user control on some window.
Conclusion :- If you want to reuse the control then make it as a user control otherwise define it in required window.
A window is managed by the OS and is placed on the desktop.
A UserControl is managed by wpf and is placed in a Window or in another UserControl.
Applcations could be created by have a single Window and displaying lots of UserControls in that Window.
wpf window is a Win32 window, but user control is just something of wpf, not a Win32 window.
I presume you refer to the windows forms. Usually they are classified as user controls and custom controls - same stands for web forms as well. For more information you can refer to these links control vs user control in winforms and over view of user controls and custom contorls.