Suddenelfilio’s Weblog

I’m currently trying out the Microsoft Expression Blend designer (formerly known as Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer). I must say it’s already very nice, the only I still can’t seem to get working is the integration with visual studio .net 2005 to edit the code behind files… Anyway that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

We probably know that you can do marvelous things with WPF it’s like a Flash designer but for .Net developers : Not sure Adobe is going to like that. So why should you constrain yourself to the old looking windows? Why not try something more different.

The image below shows you the kind of application I mean.

As you can see the image has something extra stick out in the left upper corner. To achieve this you just set the WindowStyle to None, Background to “transparent” and AllowTransparancy to “True”.

This will give you a borderless and transparent window. In this example I’ve set the background of the grid using an ImageBrush that will allow me to use a customized background image

….

Next is the actual image that represents the out-of-border network drive. This is nothing more than an image placed in that particular position. Okay the application is ready to run.When you run the application you’ll see that you can’t drag the application to another location on the screen…

To solve this problem you need to add a Thumb. A Thumb is a WPF Control that can be dragged around. You can declare a thumb that has the same size as your window. When you do this the application will kind of funny because all you see is a light gray area. To prevent this overlay set the Opacity property of the Thumb to 0.

Next thing to do is to implement the DragDelta event of the thumb. It’s this code that will actually move the entire window. The code for this is pretty simple:

Public Sub onDragDelta(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As Primitives.DragDeltaEventArgs)
Canvas.SetLeft(Me, Canvas.GetLeft(Me) + e.HorizontalChange)
Canvas.SetTop(Me, Canvas.GetTop(Me) + e.VerticalChange)
End Sub