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Asked: 2026-05-13T08:58:34+00:00

Assume i have an empty form 100px by 100px at 0,0 coordinates on the

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Assume i have an empty form 100px by 100px at 0,0 coordinates on the screen. It has no border style. Is there any way to have this positioned BEHIND the desktop icons?

I would assume this would involve the process Progman because thats what contains the desktop icons. But no matter what i try… getting window handles and changing parents etc, i cant seem to get the window to appear behind the icons.

Any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Essentially you want to draw on the desktop wallpaper. The desktop hierarchy looks like this:

    "Program Manager" Progman
  "" SHELLDLL_DefView
    "FolderView" SysListView32

    It’s the SysListView32 that actually draws the desktop icons, so that’s what you have to hook. And you can’t just stick your form on top of it; you have to grab a WindowDC to that handle and draw on the DC.

    It can be done – it has been done, but you’re going to be using a lot of interop. Forget about doing this with a traditional Winforms Form. I don’t think I’ve even seen it done in C#, although somebody did it in python, if that helps. I’m not a python coder myself, but the code is pretty short and easy to understand.

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