dwm

I am trying to make a window that alternates between having an Aero/Glass and a custom rendered frame (by handling WM_NCPAINT ) based on a user setting. (Windows Vista). DwmComposition is enabled. My app comes up with the glass frame, but as soon as I toggle the setting to trigger the custom WM_NCPAINT codepath then toggle back to use DefWindowProc 's WM_NCPAINT handling, the native frame is now perpetually stuck in the "Vista Basic" style - it's no longer translucent and the caption buttons look different to the normal Aero/Glass ones. I've tried just about every way of poking the window from

What color must i paint in the client area in order to make glass appear? i've extended the frame of my form into the client area using: DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea(self.Handle, margins); i cannot find any official documentation from Microsoft on what color and/or alpha the DWM will look for to replace with glass. The documentation on DwmExtendFrameInClientArea doesn't even mention that a custom color is required. There's only hearsay and myth that a special color is even required. The closest i can find is a topic on MSDN: Custom Window Frame Using DWM For the extended frames to be visible,

Using the undocumented SetWindowCompositionAttribute API on Windows 10, it's possible to enable glass for a window. The glass is white or clear, as seen in this screenshot: However, the Windows 10 Start menu and the notification center, which both also uses glass, both blend with the accent colour, like so: How does it do it? Investigations The accent colour in the following examples is a light purple - here's a screenshot from the Settings app: The AccentPolicy structure defined in this example code has accent state, flags and gradient color fields: AccentPolicy = packed record AccentState:

Using GDI+ to draw various colors: brush = new SolidBrush(color); graphics.FillRectangle(brush, x, y, width, height); You'll notice that no opaque color shows properly on glass: How do i draw solid colors on glass? You'll also notice that a fully opaque color is handled differently depending on what color it is: opaque black: fully transparent opaque color: partially transparent opaque white: fully opaque Can anyone point me to the documentation on the desktop compositor that explains how different colors are handled? Update 3 You'll also notice that FillRectangle behaves differently than

How do you use DwmGetColorizationColor ? The documentation says it returns two values: a 32-bit 0xAARRGGBB containing the color used for glass composition a boolean parameter that is true "if the color is an opaque blend" ( whatever that means ) Here's a color that i like, a nice puke green: You can notice the color is greeny, and the translucent title bar (against a white background) shows the snot color very clearly: i try to get the color from Windows: DwmGetColorizationColor(dwCcolorization, bIsOpaqueBlend); And i get dwColorization: 0x0D0A0F04 bIsOpaqueBlend: false According to the