On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 06:52:41 -0700, "Pablo Fernicola [MS]"
<pablo@fernicola.org> wrote:
>You will notice that the application gets the glass looking borders, has
>live previews in Alt-Tab and taskbar thumbnails, and its contents show up in
>Flip3D. This is indeed done by using a shared surface, between Direct3D and
>the DWM.
With my user's hat on, I have observed the non-client area glass
styling and shadows as well as Alt+Tab and Flip3D.
With my developer's hat on, I have seen references to shared surfaces
being used by the DWM and noted that there is an updated version of
Direct3D 9 to support them. Is there any way that an application that
I write can access the DWM owned shared surfaces in the same way that
Flip3D does? (Actually I am interested in either consuming or
producing them)
>Perhaps you were after having the application content "blended" with the
>desktop's background, like windowless controls? If that was the feature you
>were after, that is not something that is enabled by the DWM.
Yes, that's correct, I am asking about blending application content
with the desktop. There are DWM APIs to extend the glass effect into
the client area of a window. I'm assuming the Win32 user functions
UpdateLayeredWindow and SetLayeredWindowAttributes (which do support
blending the application content) were reimplemented to use the DWM,
and they work very well. Given that this level of support exists, I
am surprised that there doesn't appear to be a simple flag to enable
to make a window (including the client area) simply blend with the
desktop. This would be very handy for a floating object window with
3D content for instance.
I'm somewhat disappointed that this functionality isn't exposed.
Thanks,
Chris