I'm a beginner learning WPF, and need to create an Application Bar that launches applications. I need it to auto hide, but I'm struggling with this. I implemented the docking aspect fine, and registered it as an autohide toolbar with windows, but am unsure how to go about actually implementing the autohide functionality. Currently, my window using a storyboard event to "hide" by changing to opacity to 0, but then the bar will still be 'on top' and block all of the other applications, so this doesn't quite work.
In addition to setting your opacity, set the visibility to collapsed at the end. Once the element is transparent, the collapsed status will make it unable to be hit by mouse. Do the opposite (Visibility set to Visible, then change opacity or whatever) on the opening animation.
Related
I am using LayoutAnchorable of Avalon Dock to dock my toolbar in my WPF application. Everything works fine. But as soon as I set the AllowTransparency property of parent window to true, it stopped working.
AnchorableControl is being shown as it should. When I unpin it, it docks itself to side of the window. But it nevers comes up upon hovering the mouse over it.
I am trying to find a workaround in the source control of Avalon dock. but there is lot to take and code isn't very straight.
Unfortunatly many Controls (including HWND etc.) are not working when AllowTransparency is set to true. But this is outdated anyway.
If you want to style your Window take a look at the WindowChrome Class and/or use a the very good Design Library MahApps.Metro
Edit:
Found the reason here.
I have created a custom popup to decorate my buttons with animated tooltips. I track Button.MouseEnter for the button to decide when to display the popup. I use Button.MouseLeave to determine when to hide the popup.
Problem is Button.MouseLeave is fired prematurely if the popup moves over the mouse cursor (its appearance is animated) despite the fact that I have set IsHitTestVisible = false for the popup and all its visual children.
Is this the way WPF is designed to work? I need MouseLeave to only fire when the cursor moves away from the button itself and not be influenced by the popup.
Thanks
I believe that the Popup control is actually contained within a window, which is why the popup can extend beyond the window bounds in some cases. (It's also why popup transparency is not supported in Silverlight.)
I believe that while the popup control is no longer processing "hits", the container window is, which is why you are losing your button's mouse focus.
I've not tested this, but you might try creating a template for your button and actually declaring the popup as part of the button (rather than below it). This may cause WPF to view the popup control as part of the button and eliminate the problem of losing mouse focus. This works in other scenarios, but I'm not 100% sure how this will work with a Popup.
EDIT: As a side note, the deault WPF tooltip allows you to override the template. I'm not sure what your goals are, but you may find it easier to change the appearance and behavior of the default tooltip than to try to roll your own, as a lot of these sorts of problems have already been solved in the default Tooltip.
In WPF, how can I hide the minimize button (only the minimize, not also the maximize...) of a window.
The code in this forum almost work for me. The behavior of that code is that it's disabled the minimize button. But, how hide it?
http://forums.silverlight.net/forums/p/222067/532926.aspx
How about disabling the resize attribute?
ResizeMode="NoResize"
I think you would have to hide the default window title and draw your own titlebar.
e.g.: C# WPF Custom Title Bar Tutorial
and Moving a WPF Window with Custom Chrome
I have a WP7 panorama application that uses a dark image for the panorama's background. The issue is when the device is set to light theme. The issue root cause is the Focus state transition animation for the TextBox sets the background color to transparent.
Since my panorama is always dark I'd like my textbox to always be white background.
First attempt set textbox background to white.
FAIL: transition changes background back to transparent when textbox gets focus.
Next attempt programmatically set textbox background to white on gotfocus.
FAIL: transition changes background back to transparent when textbox gets focus.
Next attempt override control template and change transition.
FAIL: never could get this happy with WP7, not sure if I used right version
Next attempt override control template using Blend 4.
FAIL: might have missed something but every state looked correct.
I see where lots of others are having this same problem but no here's exactly what you need to do so you don't trip up some minor detail.
If you can help us with a solution please do share.
Here's what I tried with Blend 4.
Opened my project in Blend 4, selected my textbox, right-clicked on it, chose Edit Template, and then Edit a Copy.
Here's where I'm not exactly sure what I need to do.
I went to FocusStates, and selected Focused. What I see in the preview pane looks like what I want. A nice textbox with a white background.
I look on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645061%28v=vs.95%29.aspx and I see there is a storyboard animation for the various FocusStates and I figure in WP7 there must be one that makes textboxes have a transparent background when they have focus in the light theme.
My goal of making my textbox have a white background since I have a panorama with a dark background image has proven difficult to say the least.
You were on the right path with this retemplating the control in blend. You can control formating of each constituent component of the control and for each state.
If you're still having trouble with this, post your resulting xaml for the TextBox in your question once you've made the changes.
Re your edit: Focused -> Grid-EnabledBorder-Background uses static resource PhoneTextBoxEditBackgroundBrush. You can change this to a local value then choose your colour.
I'm about to lose my mind here.
Why won't the checkbox control blend with what's behind it?
The question applies to all WinForms controls, but I'm using this as an example.
A picture is worth a thousand words:
And a few more words:
What's behind the CheckBox are colored PictureBoxes and a Button.
The CheckBox's BackColor is set to Transparent. But somehow it decides that that means it should share the BackColor of the containing Form (is that its idea of the illusion of transparency?).
Is this not possible in WinForms? I could swear I did this before.
UPDATE:
I just tried this:
On that form, set the CheckBox's BackColor to Transparent, then change the BackColor of the containing Form to some other color, and the CheckBox will match that BackColor. What the.......?
This is a side effect of controls being Windows windows. A window is responsible for drawing itself, the OnPaintBackground and OnPaint methods take care of that.
This rendering model doesn't support transparency well. There is support for true transparency by using layered windows. That's implemented by the video adapter, Windows uses it hardware overlay feature. But that only works for toplevel windows, not child windows. Note the Form.Opacity and Form.TransparencyKey properties.
There's partial support for transparency through a trick. A control can fake it by asking the parent window to draw itself first inside the control window. That produces the background pixels, it can then draw on top of that. Setting the BackColor property to Color.Transparent enables this trick for controls that support this. All of the ButtonBase derived classes do. But not controls that are wrappers for native Windows controls.
"Asking the parent window" is where the flaw in this trick becomes visible in your screen shot. You are seeing the form pixels. Stacking effects don't work, it never considers any intermediary window in the Z-order, only the parent. This is fixable but very ugly, there's a KB article that show the code.
Also notable is that WPF doesn't have this restriction. Controls are not windows, they render by painting themselves on top of the parent. Layers of paint. Transparency is now trivial, just don't paint.
Bob Powell has written an excellent article about transparent controls. Check it out:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141227200000/http://bobpowell.net/transcontrols.aspx
Can you set the backcolor of the checkbox manually to the color you want? (The value in the picturebox behind it)
'Transparent' may mean something different from what you want to MS.
Also, try changing the zorder of the pictureboxes (bring to front) and see if that changes the checkbox's underlying color.