Question

I am new to Windows 7 programming and am trying to get a sense of what technologies or frameworks I should be using (I suppose within .NET) that will let me create graphical elements on the screen without any of the standard Windows UI chrome (resize handles, minimize/maximize, title bar etc.).

As a “hello world”, I’d like to be able to create a 200×200 pixel box, red, with a slight transparency, that has the text “hello world” in it and maybe moves across the screen. That would be a great start into the kind of thing I’m interested in.

Answer 1

In WPF you can set the WindowStyle to “None” and the ResizeMode to “NoResize” to remove the OS chrome from the window. To make the window translucent you need to set AllowsTransparency to “True” and set Opacity to a percent value of your choosing.

Here’s a window with no chrome and an 80% opacity:

<Window x:Class="TestWpfApplication.Test"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    WindowStyle="None"
    ResizeMode="NoResize"
    AllowsTransparency="True"
    Opacity="0.8"
    Title="Test Window" Height="300" Width="300">

You can even create a brush and set that to the Window’s OpacityMask property to make the window non-square.