Vista and WPF

Posted By: ElucidWeb | Jun 8th, 2006 @ 8:53 PM
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#Jun 8th, 2006 @ 8:53 PM
ElucidWeb
ElucidWeb
I have a rather interesting question about Vista and WPF.  Is the 3D-Flip in Vista written in WPF?

Also I would like to write an extension for Vista that would mimick the Expose functionality that OSX and XGL have where all of the windows are shrunk down and shown on the desktop.  Can anyone give me some pointers to documentation or anything that could get me rolling on that?  I am not even sure where to look, thanks!

#Jun 8th, 2006 @ 9:14 PM
Pon
Pon

Check out Microsoft Scalable Fabric on the Microsoft Research site, it does exactly what you're looking for. There might be some docs there.
#Jun 8th, 2006 @ 11:49 PM
DCMonkey
DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!
Flip 3D uses the same unmanaged low level code that WPF uses, but the API will be undocumented for v1 I think. It likely also uses a window thumbnail API built on top of that, which I believe will be documented. So you might be able to work with that, though it will also be unmanaged.



#Jun 9th, 2006 @ 6:44 AM
Sven Groot
Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...
Flip3D isn't using WPF, but the Desktop Window Manager (the 3D desktop composition engine that makes Flip3D possible) is built on milcore, the unmanaged low-level engine that underlies WPF.

And yes, you can access and use the application thumbnails for your own purposes. You probably can't do this directly from a .Net application, but some PInvoking will get the job done.

The important functions to look at are DwmRegisterThumbnail and DwmUpdateThumbnailProperties. The first will tell the DWM "I want to show the thumbnail for window X on window Y" and the second will cause it to be drawn with the specified properties. Note that the documentation for both these functions (and the rest of the DWM) is still far from complete.
#Jun 9th, 2006 @ 8:50 AM
GRiNSER
GRiNSER
GRiNSER puts a smile on your face :)
well, so someone could build a Expose like program with the DWM Thumbnail functions?
That would be cute...
#Jun 9th, 2006 @ 11:15 AM
Sven Groot
Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...
I was curious about how to do this myself, and tried it out a bit. I posted the result in the Sandbox.
#Jun 9th, 2006 @ 7:54 PM
ElucidWeb
ElucidWeb
Sven Groot wrote:
Flip3D isn't using WPF, but the Desktop Window Manager (the 3D desktop composition engine that makes Flip3D possible) is built on milcore, the unmanaged low-level engine that underlies WPF.

And yes, you can access and use the application thumbnails for your own purposes. You probably can't do this directly from a .Net application, but some PInvoking will get the job done.

The important functions to look at are DwmRegisterThumbnail and DwmUpdateThumbnailProperties. The first will tell the DWM "I want to show the thumbnail for window X on window Y" and the second will cause it to be drawn with the specified properties. Note that the documentation for both these functions (and the rest of the DWM) is still far from complete.


Hmmm, interesting...Should be relatively easy to do that but I would like the animation to transition smoothly much like Expose does from True size of window down to the shrunk down size and I know in Win32 and GDI thats just not possible without an insane amount of code and triple buffering, etc.  I will look into it...

I am pretty sure I could pull this off if not at least a prototype that I can build off of!!  Will keep you posted in this forum!
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