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 recently introduced a WPF control to my VB.net WinForms application. The control looks good and works great. However, depending on which environment I run the application, I will get different behavior. The two machines that differ are both running Windows 8.1 with the default theme.
I have read a few questions about adding proper theme settings and I don't believe that is the issue.
In the environment that is incorrect I have observed the following behavior:
Upon loading the form containing the WPF control, the calling form will resize and move around the screen
Controls contained within the form that also contains the WPF control will often "ghost" upon resizing the application
Both the calling form and the form containing the WPF control shrank upon loading the containing form. By shrank I mean window size, control size of all controls, font size, etc...
I'm wondering if the application was built against one version of the library and the DLL versions differ on the deployment environments. But I'm not sure how to look for this.
Has anyone encountered this before?
I found the problem.
This was the result of DPI scaling. The application was acting out anytime the DPI settings were set to anything other than 100%. WPF controls scale differently from Winform controls causing the strange behavior. The following stackoverflow Q/A explains how to remove the DPI dependency
Disable DPI awareness for WPF application
We have a couple of winforms applications that host a bunch of icons in a ListView control as a handy quick launch down the side of the applications. We also have "XP visual styles" enabled in the project build options for both which works great for Windows XP, but we've had someone highlight that the items in the control are (roughly) twice as wide in one application as the other (normal) when both are run under Windows 7.
As far as I can see in code, both ListViews are added to their respective forms using the windows forms designer, and there doesn't appear to be anything fiddling with the width of the labels (etc.)
I'm a little confused why the two applications/ListViews are behaving differently, and also why there doesn't seem to be anything I can do to affect the width of the items in the ListView? What have I missed when checking for differences between the "working" scenario and the "non-working" scenario?
It appears that setting the StateImageList property causes this (even if it is the same image list as used for the normal icons)
In my C# .NET 3.5 application I am using WinForms forms with docking and anchoring. I am working on a desktop with big display and on a small laptop.
A few forms has a list view with anchors set to both 4 bounds and a few buttons below.
My forms are shown incorrectly: if I edit a form on the desktop computer, on the notebook the lowest buttons will be not shown (will be cut by a container bounds) and I only see stretched list view. If I edit a form on the laptop, on the desktop computer it will not fill the container completely.
I found the reason - the form's AutoScaleDimensions differs for these two computers, on the desktop it is (8F, 16F) while on the laptop it is (6F, 13F). I am puzzled of how to make my GUI working on both?
It seems I found the solution myself: the reason of incorrect behavior was that my user control and containing forms were designed on different computers so they scaling did not match. After I opened them all in a single computer and set user control's AutoScaleMode = AutoScaleMode.Inherit, it worked perfectly.
I'm having problems with the rendering of a WPF app over a remote desktop connection.
The applications chrome is rendering, but none of the content is coming through, as if the window is not drawing. Instead the previous content of the screen is showing in it's place.
This has been a problem with the application running on both Vista & Win 7, with remote control being taken from XP and Win7.
The problem is not application specific, if I create a new WPF app, with just a textblock on the window, it will also not run. (Neather will the windows preview in VS2008 display.)
Is there some trick to getting WPF running under RDP?
I read on Kevin Dente's blog (from a twitter post) that he was having trouble with WPF apps in virtual machines. While not the same as Remote Desktop, it's possible the problem could be the same. Kevin was able to fix his problem by disabling hardware accelleration by creating a DWORD registry value at
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration
and then setting it to 1.
His original blog post is here: http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2009/10/19/visual-studio-2010-beta-2-editor-performance-fix-running-on-a-virtual-machine.aspx
That may not be your exact solution, but maybe it points you in the right direction.
WPF should render over RDP; it's smart enough to know when it can render in hardware, and when it can't it reverts to its own GDI+ based software rendering. I would make sure you're running .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 on the remote machine, since there were changes to remoting that might pose issues. (See link below.)
I've been developing a WPF app for the past 6 months and it works just fine over RDP. (From Vista and Win7 to XP, Vista and Server 2003.) One important caveat, however, is that it renders using the Classic theme. So if you're using controls that don't have a classic theme, they won't render. If you're just dropping a TextBox on a Window, then obviously that's not your problem.
Check out this question for some links that may be helpful: Are there problems with rendering WPF over Remote Desktop under Windows XP?
I just had this problem with the ribbonwindow not displaying correctly when testing for the first time via RDP - the transparent background was white, the close minimize/maximize buttons were missing, the rounded corners on the bottom of the window were square, and the top row of ribbon buttons were almost impossible to select.
Turns out there was a simple fix for me. Right-click the RDP connection icon (I have it saved on my desktop), select "Edit", then the "experience" tab, and change "detect connection quality automatically" to "LAN (10 Mbps or higher)".
This fixed it for me.
Ade
Did you also try Win7 latest RDP - Win7 connection? The thing is WPF doesn't use GDI to draw elements.
VNC clients (like UltraVNC) probably will do the trick for you as they using much simplier algorithms more like of sending bitmaps.
I have the same problem than the asker. The standard, out-of-the-box Checkbox is not rendering correctly. I can only see if it is checked when hoovering the checkbox. Otherwhise, no difference between checked and unchecked. Important note : It occurs when setting the foreground to white (see here : https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/1c03db49-7e53-4cbb-9dd1-b328017c4453/wpf-checkbox-and-radiobutton-check-mark-not-showing-under-xp-windows-classic-theme-and-remote?forum=wpf)
Our application used to have this problem with a custom progress bar.
We fixed this by setting the background color of the Border control to White. This leads me to think there is an issue with transparent backgrounds
There is no special trick needed to get WPF content to show across remote desktop. Our WPF-based app renders just fine over RDP (tried from numerous machines) with no problems. We're even using animations, gradients, WriteableBitmap, etc. w/ no problems.