I was wondering if I can customise the look and feel of the OOB window of my SL app? I want it to look different than the standard windows frame (maybe at least change the visible buttons like minimise or maximise...)
thanks
You can only change the Window's Height, Width, and Title. You can't modify the window chrome.
Window Settings on MSDN
One of many blog entries pointing out that there's no windows chrome customization
This feature is showing up as a common feature request for Silverlight 4, though.
In Silverlight 4, you can choose to remove the window chrome for OOB applications and produce controls to trigger your own window moving/resizing/minimizing/maximizing functionality.
http://blogs.msdn.com/olivers/archive/2010/03/15/silverlight-4-out-of-browser-enhancements.aspx
Related
This question already has answers here:
How to create custom window chrome in wpf?
(5 answers)
Closed 6 months ago.
We are developing a WPF application which uses Telerik's suite of controls and everything works and looks fine. Unfortunately, we recently needed to replace the base class of all our dialogs, changing RadWindow by the standard WPF window (reason is irrelevant to this discussion). In doing so, we ended up having an application which still looked pretty on all developer's computers (Windows 7 with Aero enabled) but was ugly when used in our client's environment (Terminal Services under Windows Server 2008 R2).
Telerik's RadWindow is a standard user control that mimicks a dialog's behaviour so styling it was not an issue. With WPF's Window though, I have a hard time changing its "border". What I mean by "border" here is both the title bar with the icon and the 3 standard buttons (Minimize, Maximize/Restore, Close) and the resize grip around the window.
How can I change the looks of these items:
Title bar color
3 standard buttons
Window's real border color
With round corners if possible.
Those are "non-client" areas and are controlled by Windows. Here is the MSDN docs on the subject (the pertinent info is at the top).
Basically, you set your Window's WindowStyle="None", then build your own window interface. (similar question on SO)
You need to set
WindowStyle="None", AllowsTransparency="True" and optionally ResizeMode="NoResize"
and then set the Style property of the window to your custom window style, where you design the appearance of the window (title bar, buttons, border) to anything you want and display the window contents in a ContentPresenter.
This seems to be a good article on how you can achieve this, but there are many other articles on the internet.
I found a more straight forward solution from #DK comment in this question, the solution is written by Alex and described here with source,
To make customized window:
download the sample project here
edit the generic.xaml file to customize the layout.
enjoy :).
Such statements as “you can't because only Windows can control the non-client area” are not quite true — Windows lets you specify the dimensions of the non–client area.
The downside is this is only possible by calling Windows' kernel methods, and since you're in .NET, which is not native code, you'll need P/Invoke. (Remember, the whole of the Windows Form UI and console application I/O methods are offered as wrappers that make system calls under the hood.) Hence, as documented in MSDN, it is completely possible to use P/Invoke to access those methods that are needed to set up the non–client area.
Update: Simpler than ever!
As of .NET 4.5, you can just use the WindowChrome class to adjust the non-client area. Get started here and here, a guide to changing the window border dimensions. By setting it to 0, you'll be able to implement your custom window border in place of the system's one.
I suggest you to start from an existing solution and customize it to fit your needs, that's better than starting from scratch!
I was looking for the same thing and I fall on this open source solution, I hope it will help.
I would like to change the size of the window's icon in the xaml window.
I know that I can hide the window's title bar and create a custom title bar, but is there
any way to change the icon size alone ?
I was looking for many forums and couldnt find a proper solution.
How do I change WPF Menu's icon column size?
The above link explains for menu's icon size but I want for the window's icon
The standard window chrome is handled by the Windows.
I guess the reason for that is consistency across applications which is also the reason why I dislike the Office/Ribbon replacement of the standard chrome.
In Windows 8 Metro applications there will be no window chrome so all UI will be up to you.
In Windows 8 desktop applications (and Windows 7 applications) you will need to replace the entire chrome completely.
To save yourself some coding time, check out this solution over at CodePlex:
http://wpfwindow.codeplex.com/
I'm developing a WPF application, and using SketchFlow to prototype the application for the client. All the screens that I've created so far in SketchFlow only show a white frame inside which my screens appear in the SketchFlow player. The normal window frame elements (title bar, status bar, etc) are missing. How can I add these in?
There are some nice mockup style controls included in Blend 4 as a sample, one of them is a Window mockup (the one eibhrum mentioned above I believe).
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/expression/archive/2010/05/13/how-to-add-mockup-controls-to-your-expression-blend-library.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0
This might answer your question: Window like control in SketchFlow?
There's no window-like control in Sketchflow. Basically, you have to do it from scratch.
I am building an application which has multiple user entry screens. I would like to know if there are advantages/disadvantages of using wpf popups rather than modal windows?
I am using mvvm-light.
I have noticed that popups are being used extensively in touch applications (eg iPad).
The issue is really one of Desktop vs. Web applications. Popups in Silverlight (or other touch apps) involve having only one real window to work with (the mobile surface, or the web browser). If you are writing a desktop app, then modal windows will probably match user expectations better as Popups cannot leave the parent window.
pop ups are nice but are very difficult to control. In our apps we are using adorners to be 'pop-up' editors - we have created a control that can hold any other control and display it in the adorner layer of the main window. This allows to do things such as having 1 control appear next to another yet still have the other control in use or we can grey out the background and force focus to the new control and not allow any other control to be used until the 'ok' button is pressed. If you Google for adorners in wpf you will find a lot of excellent articles.
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.