I have a window which is supposed to act like a Windows Vista(+) gadget; its supposed to stay on the desktop, not to appear on taskbar and the alt+tab menu, but most importantly, not to get minimized.
Here is its header:
As its style is set to None, it has no control buttons (minimize, close, etc...) but it still can be minimized using the "Show Desktop" feature and the Winkey+D combination.
How can I prevent that from happening?
Thanks!
"Show Desktop" does more than just minimize windows - after minimizing all the windows it can, it then brings the desktop window to the top of the z-order. Raymond Chen has a good explanation of this.
You could mark your window as "always on top" but then it would appear on top of every window. I can't think of any other way of preventing Show Desktop from hiding your window. A quick experiment with Windows Sidebar shows that it is also minimized on Show Desktop unless you set the "Sidebar is always on top of other windows".
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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'm not sure that's the right way to say it, but what I want is to for my wpf main window to have it's own bar that will behave like a taskbar, and any children windows that will be open from the main one will be placed in that bar in a similar way like the taskbar works in windows - a rectangle showing the window name for example, on click it opens you the window, if you click minimize it will minimize it to the bar, and with some option, to get it out of the main window and move it to the real windows taskbar, with another option for putting it back in. The problem is I don't know if this is even possible, and I don't know the name of such an element, so if anyone can give me any tips I'll be really thankful.
I worked on an application years ago (.NET 3.0: first WPF release!) that did exactly that. We ran into a lot of issues getting it to work, but we were pretty successful in the end. One thing we didn't support was moving it to the Windows taskbar.
The best option would be to set an attached property on each Window. This would register a Window with your custom taskbar, so if you wanted to move the Window out of your custom bar, you'd set the property to false. Setting the property to true would add it to the collection of application windows, as well as register event handlers to track the state of the Window.
One of the major pain points for us was getting the Window animations correct. If you're not running in XP, this probably less of an issue, as the animations in Vista (or is it 7?) and above aren't really showing where a Window is going on minimize. In the end, we had to do a lot of low level Win32 (p/Invoke) work for this.
Take a look at AvalonDock and WPF MDI:
http://avalondock.codeplex.com/
http://wpfmdi.codeplex.com/
My application is designed to sit in the system tray and behave similarly to the Network/Volume/Power/Action Centre tray items in Windows 7 (and the equivalent items in Windows Vista). That is, it becomes visible when the tray icon is clicked, and becomes hidden when focus is lost.
The application is written in WPF, but I am currently using NotifyIcon from WinForms for the tray icon.
I would like to know if anyone has any suggestions as to how I might determine the position (i.e. screen coordinates) of my application's tray icon. The default Windows Vista/7 tray items have some way of doing this, since the pop-out windows are centre-aligned above the relevant tray icon.
In Vista this wasn't much of an issue: I had the application permanently set to the bottom-right corner, and this looked fine (though there was no logic included for cases when the taskbar wasn't placed at the bottom of the screen). However, in Windows 7 my application ends up obscuring the new system tray pop-out box, rather than hovering above it like the volume controls, etc., do.
The best solution I've seen in my searches so far is to handle the mouse-up event on the NotifyIcon and use the mouse coordinates to determine the position of the icon. I think I'll end up using this method if unless someone has a better idea, though it's not ideal as the position will vary slightly depending on where within the icon the user clicks.
Windows 7 and higher expose the Shell_NotifyIconGetRect() function, which returns the screen coordinates of the icon's bounding rectangle.
You'll need to provide it the notify icon GUID, though, and I don't know if you can access that property through the managed NotifyIcon class.
Further to this, I've written about a method to find the location of a notify icon when the Shell_NotifyIconGetRect function is not available: http://blog.quppa.net/2010/12/28/windows-7-style-notification-area-applications-in-wpf-part-6-notify-icon-position-pre-windows-7/
I created a WPF window with system tray icon via NotifyIcon. When I click the icon in the system tray, the WPF application pops up and is shown on the screen.
But this solution does not fit my needs. I want the solution to be opened the same way the volumn, network center, security center, etc. is opened on system tray icon single click (just a little tiny box on top of the taskbar which can neither be moved nor has a close button in the upper right corner).
Can anyone give me a hint?
Does WindowStyle.None fit your needs (Can be set in the WindowStyle Property of your Window)?
When I have 2 apps open and one has the focus but I want to execute a command in the other app, it requires a click to regain focus and another to execute the command. Is there some good reason why I couldn't take focus on MouseOver? I'm working with a WPF app if that is pertinent. TIA
EDIT: Oddly enough the MouseOvers work without focus.
I would not recommend doing this. This is not a standard way of working in Windows, so you will confuse your users. People are used to clicking into an application (or tabbing) to provide focus.
However, this is a configurable setting via the Accessability Tools in Windows. It can be enabled by choosing "Activate a window by hovering over it with the mouse" globally. Let your users specify this behavior if they want it.
The setting is configurable at a system-wide level. You should never ever override the user's current setting regarding this.
MS Windows Vista -- focus follows mouse (There's also a link on how to do it on XP.)
Edit: Normally, you can click a button on a form and both bring focus to the window and click it at the same time. The origins of the current setting "eating" the initial mouse click that brings focus to a window started as a fix to a bug in the Ribbon UI. The discussion is somewhere in this video: The Story of the Ribbon. Sorry I can't narrow it down more than that, but at least the video is a great insight and work watching - maybe you can send a message to Jensen Harris if you need a faster answer.
Edit 2: I just added a button to a WPF window, and I'm able to click it as long as I can see it - whether or not the window has focus.
You can take focus on MouseOver manually