I want to fade a WPF window in, but I can't do that unless the window is set to transparent and window style is set to none, and I don't want that. Instead I want to create the illusion that the window is fading in by putting on top of it whatever is under it and then gradually reduce the opacity so it is brought into view.
I know that in order to to this another window with transparency and no borders must be used as the object that holds the captured image and performs the fade.
So in theory I know what I want, but I have no idea of how to capture as an image whatever is under a WPF window. Of course, the interface that I want to reveal will be hidden until the capture is performed, so the window on top doesn't capture the actual interface, and I will show the GUI only after the image has been captured, so it can be revealed after the image starts losing opacity.
That was just an explanation for what I need this. The basic question is: how do I capture to an image whatever is under a window (even if it requires the window to be transparent)?
Found an article here describing a couple of ways to do what I need: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/91487/Screen-Capture-in-WPF-WinForms-Application
Related
INTRODUCTION
Using C# or VB.NET. I'm trying to make a form's background transparent; this form will be overlaped to other window, it will be a top-most window, so the transparent form (and its controls) must have the ability that they must not receive focus and they must can be clicked trough, this means if for example I perform a left-click on the transparent background, then the window on background of that (in the Z-order window) is the window that must receive the click instead.
Notes:
For avoiding the focus I'm overriding the CreateParams property as explained here.
For making my form transparent, I'm calling Win32 DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea function and also using SharpDX library as explained here. But I think this really doesn't matter with the question itself.
PROBLEM
I'll show a demostration of what I mean using images. Here below is a image of a form (with no transparency, just to simplify understanding) overlapped to a window of a text editor program; note that my form doesn't receive focus. Well, the problem is when I do click on the form's background (or one of its controls) the window on background (the text editor window) still have focus but it can't receive the click.
Here is the same image of above but with a transparent form:
RESEARCH
I'm not really sure about what to investigate, so I'm going blind trying to find something useful in a trial-and-error stage by overriding the Window procedure (WndProc) of the transparent form to test related windows messages, like WM_NCHITEST or WM_MOUSEACTIVATE message as said here:
Windows form with a transparent background that cannot be clicked through
Make a form not focusable in C#
How do I create an "unfocusable" form in C#?
You can do this by sending click (mouse up & mouse down) messages to the window underneath the transparent window using WinAPI.
PostMessageA
You'll need to find the window underneath the point you require.
WindowFromPoint
You'll have to translate the position of the click events accordingly since messages are processed based on relative window position, not absolute screen position.
I actually did this quite successfully to automatically play a facebook game many years ago.
Check the RAD designer in Visual Studio.
Is the label docked to fill?
Where is the main form clickable?
The transparent color is click-though in the main parent, however, components will still retain clicks.
How to run or adjust Windows application efficiently in any screen resolution in C# 4.0?
I have done it in 1600 x 1200 resolution but if I try in lower resolutions only some part of the forms are visible.
How to solve this problem? I have searched a lot and got to know about Anchor & Dock will be useful but also to came to know that these should be used from the beginning of designing but I have completed my application while this resolution is now causing the problem when I install the application in any system
The quick and dirty method of making sure your controls remain visible would be to place a Panel on the form, set Dock = Fill and AutoScroll = True, then place every other control in your form inside it. Your controls won't get cut off, but your program won't win any awards for asthetics. If the program is brand new, that's really not the way you want to start things off.
You could redesign it to make use of Anchors and Docking, as you mentioned. You could also place items such as a row of Button controls or a series of TextBox controls in a FlowLayoutPanel, which will take care of repositioning them as you resize the form.
But if adjusting for screen resolutions is important to you, a better way would have been to use WPF from the start. Controls are automatically resized and repositioned as needed, based on their container control.
The real question should be:
How do I want the controls to resize themselves with their parent?
The answer is that you need to specify anchors. Anchors are used to tell your controls how they should react on resize, and what the concerns should be.
Lets say you have a form with two [Cancel] and [OK] buttons. They are usually seen fit at the bottom right of your window. But the default Anchor property is set to Top, Left, so on your form's resize, they stick to the Top, Left corner where they belong according to the default settings. This won't be any trouble if your maximize your form, thus you'll have your button probably in the middle of the screen. But at least, you will see every controls adequately.
But what if resize your form smaller and smaller? Do you still want them to stick at the Top, Left, or Bottom, Right would be more useful? My guess is that you should set the Anchor property to Bottom, Right, for those two.
This might come in handy to have different Anchor property settings depending on how you want your control to react to your form resize. Let's take three TextBox controls aligned horizontally with each other. Perhaps your longer field will be your object Description property located on horizontal-center of your form. Then, when you risize, you have to think what would make more sense on resize. If it is to make it longer on resize in order to fill your form width with all your control, then perhaps you want the DescriptionTextBox to get wider and wider, and the contraray should also be true, on form's resize, you probably want this field to be resized smaller too. Then, to make this happen, you have to set the Anchor property to Left, Right, so that the edge of your DescriptionTextBox control remains at the same very distance of your form's edge at any time.
Another thing is of concern in case of resizing to smaller window, is its MinimumSize property. One shall agree that there is use to have a form of size 34x34 pixels. So, setting your MinimumSize property to a certain size which makes sens for the form to exist, you will avoid display glitches of controls getting one over another.
For more details on the Anchor property: Control.Anchor Property
For more details on the MinimumSize property: Control.MinimumSize Property
Hello,
Above is the program I am writing. On the right panel is basically two custom controls (the blue rectangle area) I created and just added them as controls to the background panel control when this winform program loads.
I used MS paint to draw out the pop up balloon that I want to see when my mouse enter this control's area. I want to do the following:
1. If mouse enter the control area, the yellow area balloon pop up and populate with the information of that specific control
2. If mouse move out of the control area, the pop up balloon disappear.
Can this be done with Winform application? I looked around and found out about Tooltip class but so far from researching I don't know if it does what I want to do.
I could be wrong but googling around gave me the impress that Tooltip offers very little in term of style. Ideally I want to make this pop up balloon into almost like a border-less pop up window where I can put image , font ect.....at will. Also Tooltip works if you hover over a button or specific field whereas I want the entire control area.
Can this be done? I appreciate if you can point me to any work around if there is one.
I wrote a comment, but I figure I'll expand it into a full answer. This is assuming you want a new control, which isn't a tooltip, for maximum customizability. I did something similar to this for work recently, to act as a non-modal info popup that disappears when clicked.
Creating a Custom Popup Form
What you want is essentially a floating popup that appears over your form, which means you'll want to define a new Form object, rather than a UserControl, as it won't actually be embedded within your other form.
Give it a multiline, non-editable textbox that you can fill with the information you want to populate, then simply call a new instance of the form on your Mouse_Enter event. Close it upon Mouse_Leave.
Adjusting The Style
You'll have to play with it a bit to get it to actually act like a popup and not just a window. I'd recommend setting it to a non-modal popup, and removing the border. You can write a function to automatically size it to its contents. I don't imagine you'll want the user manually resizing it.
Some other things to look into would be overriding the CreateParams property that comes with the basic Form object. You can force DropShadows and TopMost forms without making the form modal. Overriding ShowWithoutActivation to always return true will prevent the form from stealing focus when it pops up.
I'm not sure if you can pull off rounded edges like you have in your mockup. Perhaps you can pull it off with some wizardry in the OnPaint() function, but I couldn't tell you how to do it.
It might be a bit of a pain for fiddling around with, but you can get some good functionality and appearance out of it. If you think you can pull it off acceptably with the ToolTip class, go for it. It took me about a week to get my notifications where I wanted them (though I added several features that you probably don't need to worry about).
Examples
Some keywords to look up in related searches would be Toast Notification and Non-Modal Popup. This might be some use:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/442983/Android-Style-Toast-Notification-for-NET
Since you already have implemented custom user controls you might want to try it again. Make a control that is that style and color, changes it's size based on it's text. You can feed it information (such as the text to display) from your existing user control object. You can also have the mouse enter/leave code reside in your first user control.
If you're not sure how to make a rectangle with round corners you can either make it on the fly using a graphics object (which will turn into a bitmap on the screen) or make it how you want it to look in GIMP (or photoshop if you have it) then use that image as the background on your user control. Make the default background transparent (so your voids above the round corners are not grey). If you make a pre loaded image you'll need to be aware you will only be able to scale it equally in Y and X directions. unequal scaling will make it look distorted.
Can you use the Mouse_Enter event on the control?
I am using c# winforms to show an Image. The displaying of the image is done using a user control. Now I want to provide the user to draw lines, put other small images, write text etc over the image on an overlay control. How can I provide this functionality? If I use another user control to show the overlay control with transparent back, will that work?? any other solution will be welcome.
You might try approaching this with a canvas (Panel) that handles painting the image as the background and all the annotations/markup afterwards. This will make the foreground appear to be transparent. I expect you'll want to set Control.DoubleBuffer for performance.
You might experiment with setting the style ControlStyles.AllPaintingInWmPaint. Also, try overriding Control.OnPaintBackground and do nothing, and override Control.OnPaint and do all your painting inside there.
If performance is still unacceptable, pay close attention to the PaintEventArgs.ClipRect property. This is the only area you need to paint. The trick is figuring out which of your annotations/overlays intersect with this rectangle and painting them in the correct order.
Either this canvas or a higher level control will need to track mouse movement so you know where to draw the lines, paste images, etc.
Ok, I have googled, but maybe I put my search in weirdly. :/
I have a VB.NET WinForms application. I have the anchor properties set for all the controls so that it will resize all the controls to look decent when the form is maximized. (Haven't gotten around to manual resizing yet however).
Anyway, the problem:
I go to set the same properties for a button (testing with a single button for now) on the main GUI form/picture. When I go to run the program via F5, it looks decent. But when I maximize the form, the entire button covers up more than it should.
I've taken screenshots of the form so you can see a visual of what I'm talking about. :/
Before: http://zack.scudstorm.com/before.png
After: http://zack.scudstorm.com/after.png
What other propert(y|ies) do I need to set for the buttons to show up correctly? :/ (The buttons go over the boxes that say, for example, "1-1", "2-3", etc.
Thanks,
-Zack
Seems like you have anchored top-left and bottom-right when what you want is just top-left.
Edit: If it's just an image that does not change when the winform changes, then don't anchor your buttons at all. Just put them where they go. If you are scaling the image, then I would either detect the clicks on the image and do the scaling math or do the scaling math and set my buttons in code in the Form.OnResize event.
As it appears that your goal is just to be able to handle clicks on the "computers"...
One option that can be useful for this sort of task is to create an "overlay" bitmap (not displayed, but which is the exact same size as your source bitmap) which uses different colors to represent all the clickable regions. (e.g. (R=0,G=0,B=0) for computer 0, (0,0,1) for computer 1, etc)
You could even generate this bitmap somewhat automatically without too much trouble (If you have a mode where you can click the top left and then bottom right corners of the image to define a new region)
When the mouse is clicked, you can check the pixel at the scaled coordinates of the mouse position in the overlay and determine what their click corresponds to. This can be a lot easier than creating loads of controls, and makes it a lot easier to have clickable regions that aren't rectangular.