Tag: border

Office 15: per application border colours?

Winreview.ru’s latest Office 15 screenshots reveal application-specific border colours and drop-shadows. Word gets a dark blue border and shadow, Excel gets a green border and shadow, etc.:

Office 15.0.2703.1000 Borders

Microsoft in fact applied for a patent for per-window glass colourisation in late 2005 (‘Glass appearance window frame colorization’; discovered by Long Zheng in 2007). While there isn’t any glass in the Office 15 windows shown here (despite the DWM being enabled), the idea is similar.

Outlook 15

Office 15 and Windows 8 seem to be moving in similar UI directions – it seems like square corners are in and transparency is out (at least for the ‘Aero Lite’ theme).

Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 5 (Fixing Aero Borders)

View source on GitHub.

An issue that came to my attention only recently is that the borders of WPF (update: WPF is not actually to blame) windows without captions/title-bars (that is, with ResizeMode set to ‘CanResize’ and WindowStyle set to ‘None’) are drawn incorrectly when the DWM (read: Aero Glass) is enabled. Specifically, the upper and left borders are drawn one pixel too thin (e.g. 3 pixels when the system setting is 4 pixels) and the colour of the bottom and right borders is different to that of other windows. I’ve tried to illustrate these differences in the screenshot below (the image on the left is of a WPF window).

Aero Border Example

It is conceivable that this will be fixed in a future version of WPF Windows, but for now we can use the DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea function to do it manually. This is only necessary when the DWM is enabled, of course.

Continue reading “Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 5 (Fixing Aero Borders)”