Well, I was looking through some more of my prototypes that I’ve written and I came across the following example of how to use the IProgressDialog Win32 Interface to harness the power of the Built-in Progress Dialog in Windows within your own .NET applications. I have test this on WIndows 7, but ...

Here's an example of how to use the IProgressDialog Win32 Interface to harness the power of the Built-in Progress Dialog in Windows within your own .NET applications. I have test this on WIndows 7, but it should work as expected on Windows XP and Vista. The MSDN Documentation for IProgressDialog say...

Almost a year ago I've published first two articles titled "Drawing Custom Borders in Windows Forms" and they turned out to be the most successful part of my blog with almost 13 000 web views (however barely 2 000 people made through to the second part), 86 comments and almost 3 000 downlo...

In part one, I showed how to extend Form to access the non-client area of the window. Now we can start painting the borders we want. Having access to the Graphics object we can use any features of GDI+: draw lines, rectangles or other shapes, fill them using brushes, draw text and paint images. How...

I have split the code into two primary classes. First one, FormWithNonClientArea, extends the standard Form class by adding support for non-client area messages (more on this shortly) and can be uses for various scenarios. Second one, CustomBorderForm, utilizes these messages and represents a base c...

The correct way to find the location of system folders not listed in Environment.SpecialFolder.

Some of the differences between Win32 and .NET debugging

This code snippet illustrates how to capture desktop or any window to bmp file with minimum coding programmatically. It also demonstrates a neat way to save device context (DC) to file. For one of my application, there was need to take screenshot of active window, I searched net but couldn’t find an...

I though I would share a native Win32 splash solution with you on this rainy night in June (well, it is June here and it is raining from where I am, YMMV). This is slightly different from your typical splash screen as it’s done using the Win32 API calls and it’s fired off before the .NET Forms engin...

Here's the simple code necessary to add some custom menu items to your applications System Menu within a WPF application. If you're not familiar, the System Menu is the menu that shows up if you click on the apps icon in the upper left or if you right click the app in the taskbar.

This is something I used to have a code snippet for in VB6, but I haven't needed to do this in a while so I never wrote up an example in .NET. So, here's the simple code necessary to add some custom menu items to your applications System Menu. If you're not familiar, the System Menu is the menu that...

Bearing in mind the arsenal of Windows UI frameworks that exists today - Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, Windows Forms, Win32, Media Center Markup Language, Microsoft Foundation Classes and more from third parties; Microsoft has decided to build yet another one “to enable new UI experi...

If you are ever rewriting an MFC/Win32 program in .NET, you need to be aware that you cannot convert directly between a COLORREF value and a .NET Color structure. The byte order is different and will need to be swapped.

This time I present to you a class that greatly simplifies the process of searching for specific windows, types of windows, windows belonging to a specific process, having a specific text. You can search for any number of these parameters at the same time, using regular expressions for all string ma...