Question

When dragging a window around if it went to a specific area via DragMove i wanted to show a semi-transparent window overlay in that region.

Showing the window worked fine, but it would always come up on top of the window i was dragging.

I tried various things such as .focus/.activate after i show the overlay, but they didn’t work.

Each window had WindowStyle="None" Topmost="True" ShowInTaskbar="False" and the overlay window even had IsHitTestVisible="False" Focusable="False". Though, the overlay would still get focus when it’s visibility was toggled on.

Answer 1

The only thing i found to work was to hide my main window and then show it again. Though, i didn’t want it to flicker, so i disabled the dispatcher while i was doing it. This ended up working beautifully. I couldn’t find any similar issues online so i figured i’d post this to help the next person.

private void showOverlay()
{
  //show the docking window
  _overlayWindow.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;

  //problem here will be that the overlay window will be on top of main
  //this.focus   this.activate +other efforts did not work to bring main back on top

  //only thing i could find that would bring the main win on top is to hide/show it again.
  //i wrap this hide/show in a disabled dispatcher block so that the window never really gets hidden on screen

  using (var d = Dispatcher.DisableProcessing())
  {
    this.Visibility = Visibility.Hidden;
    this.Visibility = Visibility.Visible;
  }
}