I can’t help but keep liking Windows Vista AeroGlass UI. It’s simply amazing. Not an overkill, but impressive enough to get me thinking of it all the time I use Windows. That being said, I recently came across with this article in the MSDN magazine, where this effect was introduced in-depth. I found out that enabling this effect in Windows Forms was not so difficult a task after all. With a simple API, a programmer can enable the blur behind the window, extend the glassy client area, or change the color theme for a single window. All this got me pretty excited, so I thought why not give it a try and play with this little eye candy a bit.<\/p>\n
Since it’s practically only about calling the Desktop Window Manager DLL (that ships with Windows Vista), achiving the effect would be easy and independant from the programming language used. I wrote a simple test application in VB.NET, and was pretty satisfied with the results. However, as the current plan stands, only the code editor in CoolBasic project would be written in .NET. All important tools, the engine and the libraries would be written in other languages such as VC++ 6.0 and PureBasic in order to establish as low software requirements for CoolBasic games and using CoolBasic development environment in general. So I tried to achieve the AeroGlass effect in PureBasic too (since it’s used to create some tools), and succeeded at it!<\/p>\n
At that moment, I was on fire. Then I tried to apply this effect to one of my tools (Work In Progress, huss). That particular tool had some controls on its main Form. The glassy look worked fine on it, but as soon as you have labels, buttons or other controls, things get messy. The controls had opaque background color whereas their front color was transparent. Meaning that label texts, for instance, weren’t black but appeared in a carved manner. All control texts were difficult to read. Now the control background color isn’t really too much a problem as it’s easy to apply a transparent brush on them. However, fixing the foreground color proofed to be a lot trickier task.<\/p>\n
It’s obviously a GDI-related problem: It ignores alpha data whereas DWM takes advantage of ARGB-encoded brushes. It’s possible to set the Form color manually with alpha value being zero, but that way the window transparency would be gone and that’d be completely against the purpose of the entire implementation of AeroGlass. The only solution to this would be to manually draw label texts with standard bitmap blitter – which supports alpha data. All this involve creating bitmaps using DC, in addition to some tricky code for event custom handling. You’d get a text effect similar to Windows Media Player (the Vista version), including the glow behind the text. But buttons and other controls would still render incorrectly. I’ve yet to figure out a fix for this.<\/p>\n
AeroGlass could perhaps be applied to the new Editor, but not on the tools such as Auto Updater. I decided not to implement the effect for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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