Mike held a small roundtable for a number of pressies. He gave a quick rundown of things you all basically already know, so I took the time to ask a few questions which kept you guys in mind. The questions I asked:

• What’s the difference between “API Complete” (build 6801) is and “Feature Complete” (Beta 1)?
• Why were lots of code samples and features being shown off for the Superbar at PDC when developers can’t develop for it? (Rafael’s extension of my API v. Feature Complete question)
• Why were the sensor demonstrations missing from the Windows 7 keynote today?

The answers to these questions can be found in the true-to-life* transcript after the break.

*Given that this is a transcript, it may be wrought with grammatical errors, but this is exactly how the chat went down.

Bryant: I had a question which I had myself but my colleague Rafael phrased it much better than I did, and it kinda ties into your note about how the build given to developers here at PDC this week is “API Complete” whereas the builds you were… whereas beta 1 is going to be “Feature Complete” or at least that’s the attempt… my own question is: what’s the difference between “API Complete” and “Feature Complete”? More specifically, Rafael’s question is, um, he noted that there are a lot of sessions at PDC talking about the superbar, and developing for the superbar, and one session that he went to had a lot of code samples being shown, but he also took note that developers can’t even develop for it because the superbar isn’t even in the build.

Mike: So the question really is, first of all, “What’s the difference between ‘API Complete’ and ‘Feature Complete’, and what is a developer to do who wants to write software that takes advantage of features that aren’t in the current ‘M3’ build.” So API complete, um, says that all the interfaces that developers are gonna code to… are in the product, and the third milestone of Windows 7 always had the goal of being API complete, which means  we’re not going to add any more APIs subsequently. Feature complete means that all the functions that are gonna be part of Windows 7 are in that build, and our beta, which will ship early next year [in time for CES], will be Feature Complete. The real – One of the hard questions we had… which we faced, is “Well, do we give everyb—do we only demo the API Complete release even though we have been working since September when we cut M3, do we demo more than the M3 build” and the answer is “aaah! We only have these developers together that often. It’d seem like kind-of a shame to not show them everything we had,” which then begged the question “Well why don’t you just give them the build that Steven used on stage?” which was the stuff from last Friday. The answer is “Well, in order to stabilize that, we woulda had to start stabilizing it back in August to be done in September (which is kinda what we did), so we couldn’t give you something from last Friday at this scale, or at the same time, it’d seem like a shame to not show you everything that we had. So what you see here is that optimization. Is it perfect? No. I think the other thing—hey well I could tell anybody anything til it’s all the way done. The problem there is, you don’t give the ecosystem the chance to get going. So, you are here a little bit watching the sausage being made in the sense that you’re watching us have this dialog with our partners to make sure that they are ready so that when we get to beta, there’s some momentum for Windows 7, and then certainly as we get towards general availability for Windows 7, there’s a healthy set of things that take advantage of Windows 7 that are out there.

Bryant: So, I guess tying back into the API Complete v. Feature Complete stuff, could a developer develop for the superbar in 6801?

Mike: Certain aspects of it, yes; certain aspects of it, no.

Bryant: Okay.

Mike: and some of that is sorta enough work to do between now and then that when the beta comes out they can get, you know, have all those features be there.

Bryant: Okay, thanks.

Mike: Great question.

Bryant: A few more questions, I guess, but… in the keynote that I saw today, there was one thing that was notably absent, and that was the sensor demos which were later discussed in the expo hall. Are you guys saving the sensor demonstrations — like the accelerometer demos, the touch demos and such… well not the touch demos so much but mostly just sensor work) — but are you saving that more for… WinHEC?

Mike: If I told you, I’d have to kill you.

Some other pressie: Cool!

Mike: Okay, here’s the challenge. Today was the first time that we talked about Windows 7 in any scale, and I’d say, again, sorta the… how advanced this thing is – this phase, we’re further along than we’ve been at least in a long time. How much do people know? We’ve held a lot more back than ever, so today was like “WOW; lot to talk about and not a lot of time,” and we had to be sorta choiceful about what we talked about.

Bryant: Yeah.

Mike: Next week we have WinHEC – things that are about sorta the core of Windows 7 by default happened here. Things that are more… developer oriented… happened here. Things that are more hardware oriented, without being specific, you could expect to be in a convention center not unlike this one in a town with the same zipcode.

[laughter]

Mike: Yeah, in about a week.

Summary:

• What is API Complete v. Feature Complete? API Complete has the developer bits ready for the developers to work with, even if some of them are dead-ends for now. Feature Complete expands on this by making all of the APIs functional.
• Why were code samples and such being shown off for the Superbar? Developers will be able to code for it anyway, but they’ll have enough to work with between now and Beta 1 that once Beta 1 hits the scene, they’ll have a good amount of code that doesn’t require functional awareness actually prepared.
• Why were the sensor bits missing from the Windows 7 keynote? Because it’s more relevant to WinHEC, but there’s a session on that which I’ll be covering today, so it’s all good.

There you have it. I’ll be covering today’s sensor demonstration at 10:30 today. I look forward to bringing you what I see.

Using GlassLib in your program

GlassLib is going to be main focus of this part of the series. It supersedes DwmWrapper by implementing a framework around GlassBar which can be used as a complement to your visually-rich forms. In order to use this library in your project, you have to do the following:

1. Include a) a reference to the DLL in your project from Visual Studio: Project menu => Add reference, or b) the actual code files to your C# project (adding them as links (shortcuts) as opposed to copying them is more suitable if you wish include the files in multiple projects and/or wish to make changes to the code yourself).
2. Remember that all of the functionality lies in the GlassLib namespace. You can use the using or Imports clause in the beginning of your C# or VB.NET code file, respectively, or the global imports if you code exclusively in VB.NET.

Exploring the GlassLib Test app

Let’s begin exploring the framework by opening the project file for GlassLibTest. Included in the GlassLib solution, it depends on the GlassLib project reference, which on its part has all the DwmWrapper code.

Open the frmMain.cs file which is the form which is to be executed right at start up. As described in the first part, the first thing the class constructor public frmMain() should do is to set Dwm.ThrowExceptionTypes to DwmExceptionTypes.None in order to avoid any exceptions from being raised when DWM is not enabled or available on the OS, or if any function failed. The next thing the program does is to enable dragging from the Glass-extended area.

Dwm.Glass[this].DragExtendedArea = true; is useful if you want the extended area to act as the caption bar does, like in Windows Media Player. This is what the GlassBar toolbar does as well (more on this later in this part).

Switch to Designer mode (View => Designer) and you can see the layout of the form: the usual Windows Forms buttons, combo and text boxes et cetera, but also GlassBar. To add the latter to your own forms, open the Toolbox (View => Toolbox) and drag it to your form (see figure on right). The toolbar will automatically dock to the bottom of it and extend Glass from this side of the form. You are free to dock it to the whole form (or container for that matter) or one of the other sides.

Because DWM only supports Glass on top-level windows, in designer mode GlassBar falls back to UXTheme API in order to get the theme-specific background image or brush which is suitable for all non-Aero Glass themes such as Aero Basic, Luna (on Windows XP) or Windows Classic on any supported Windows version. On top of this, you can choose to write your own GlassBarRenderer.

This feature provides two key benefits to your application’s design:

• For Windows Vista systems and future OS with support for Glass: rich, seamless Glass UI
• For Windows Vista systems where DWM is disabled or unavailable, and all previous Windows releases: seamless UI deriving from the appropriate Windows theme, including custom themes created with software such as WindowBlinds.

Managing the GlassBar items

Adding your items to GlassBar is quite easy. While in Design Mode, make sure that the Properties pane is visible (View menu => Properties Window to invoke it), select Items and expand the Collection Editor. You can add, remove and rearrange the items. For each one of them you can customize their:

	Name	Used in code only (does not appear in UI)
	Enabled	Enables/disables the item from the UI
	Icon	Preferably translucent PNG image 25×25 pixels in size
	IsSeparator	Denotes whether the item is a separator (its Icon will be disregarded)
	Overlay	Image, useful for ‘hover’ effects
	Text	Alternative text shown when the item is hovered
	Visible	Shows/hides the item

You can of course manage items programmatically using the Items property, for example adding one:

Image img = Image.FromFile(“someFile.png”);

GlassBarItem gbi = new GlassBarItem(“Sample Text” + i, img);

glassBar.Items.Add(gbi);

When the logic of your program requires an item be disabled or hidden, e.g. an unavailable feature, you can use Enabled or Visible to prevent users from clicking it.

Custom renderers

Internally GlassBar defines a standard renderer which on Windows Vista with Aero Glass enables draws on a translucent surface and otherwise falls back to the system-defined theme. If you wish to code a custom renderer for your needs, what you have to do is:

1. Create a class deriving from (inheriting) from one of the following classes:
   • GlassLib.Rendering.DefaultGlassBarRenderer if you wish to customize only specific parts of the default renderer (images, background etc)
   • GlassLib.Rendering.GlassBarRenderer if you wish to build one from the ground up. This requires you to implement all of the methods and properties and is unlikely to be your choice.
2. Decide which functions or images you would like to change. You can assign any image to MainPiece, RightSecondaryStates, AnimationStrip etc.
3. The DrawBarBackground function is called every time the UI changes and needs to be redrawn. It is here where you can change most of the behavior of the default renderer and implement your own features.
4. Assign an instance of your custom renderer to GlassBar
   • glassBar.Renderer = new CustomRenderer(); or to revert to default:
   • glassBar.Renderer = new GlassLib.Rendering.DefaultGlassBarRenderer();

The test app

There is a test program added to the package, GlassLibTest, whose code and compiled binary you can explore and experiment with GlassBar and DWM.

If you have any comments, questions, wishes or just an opinion, I would be happy to hear it.

In a three-part blog post, I will show you how to use a wrapper around the Desktop Window Manager Application Programming Interface in order to control its state, change colorization, or change the rendering policy of windows from your Windows Forms and .NET 3 Presentation Foundation programs.

Getting Started

Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation will be referred to in these posts as WF and WPF respectively.

The code you will need can be downloaded from here and is written in C# (as are the code samples in this post). That being said, you can use it in projects of any other .NET language — you can include the compiled libraries as references. Otherwise (if you code in C#), you also have the option to include the files in your project and not distribute a separate library. The solution is for use in Visual Studio 2005 but is also compatible with version 2008.

The whole framework is located under the GlassLib namespace and is the source to three main types of projects:

• DwmWrapper is a .NET wrapper around the DWM API, which can be compiled in the following flavors:
  • No dependency on WF or WPF. It can be used to avoid DLL clutter when coding command-line applications to manipulate the DWM.
  • Solely WF or WPF
  • Both for mixed-framework projects.
• GlassLib is a WF-powered layer above DwmWrapper and provides a set of classes, including the GlassBar control for use in your forms
• The Test Projects you can use to try the various features that the two other projects have. They will be used here ad hoc.

In this first part, we will explore the architecture of the wrapper, its core functionality and application in Windows Forms programs.

Microsoft provides an API for DWM in the equivocal DwmApi library. Encapsulating it for easier use in .NET programs is the wrapper’s main purpose.

Since all necessary classes are located under the GlassLib namespace, in order to avoid writing it every time, I would suggest that you insert it in your C# or VB code file’s “imports” or, if you are working exclusively with VB, in your project’s “Imported Namespaces” list in order to avoid doing the first as well.

The most important class is Dwm and can be used to control virtually any aspect of DWM as long as the public API allows it. The various features are available via the following properties of Dwm:

	Blur	Enables/disables the black background transition when a window (not necessarily your window) is maximized, sets custom blur region
	Colorization	Gets/sets the Aero Glass colorization
	Composition	Enable/disable DWM, check if running and if the system is DWM-capable
	Events	Used to set up notifications for colorization, composition, non-client rendering or window-maximized changes
	Flip3D	Start/Stop Windows Flip3D or Flip
	Glass	Enable/disable Glass on a given form (via its instance, e.g. this) or window (via its handle/hWnd, an IntPtr)
	NonClientArea	For advanced users only, gets or sets how DWM is handing the painting of a given form or window (see Glass above)

Using the Wrapper

Note that DWM is only available on Windows Vista, so I would suggest that you select how to handle the wrapper’s behavior on earlier operating systems. Otherwise, exceptions will be raised which you will have to catch.

The first option is to limit the exceptions the wrapper will raise by setting Dwm.ThrowExceptionTypes to one of the available DwmExceptionTypes

	None
	UnsupportedFeatures
	DesktopWindowManager

Raising no exception will most likely suit your needs best so adjust this property before you make any other changes to DWM, preferably at program startup or in the form’s constructor.

Dwm.ThrowExceptionTypes = DwmExceptionTypes.None;

Now you can make any changes you want to your form’s state in the DWM, for example enable Glass–it is as easy as writing

Dwm.Glass[this] = new DwmMargins(100, 4, 8, 20);

where this is the instance of the form (you can replace this with any other form instance you would like) and the margins are defined as left-right-top-bottom. You can use DwmMargins.EntireWindow instead to extend glass in the whole window client area, like Mobility Center does in Windows Vista.

Restoring the default borders is done by calling the Restore method.

Dwm.Glass[this].Restore();

Receiving notifications on the global DWM state or on your forms’ is important in order to know how you should handle painting backgrounds or the non-client area. You can choose to get notified when the Aero Glass colorization is changed or DWM starts up or shuts down. In GlassLib this is straightforward: each form that you wish to be notification-aware, GlassLib will include in its list and you have to attach your handlers to the colorization, composition, non-client rendering or window-maximized changes.

Dwm.Events[this].AddHandlers(); // Notifying GlassLib…

// Add our handlers

Dwm.Events[this].CompositionChanged += new DwmEventHandler(OnCompositionChanged);
Dwm.Events[this].ColorizationChanged += new DwmEventHandler(OnColorizationChanged);

…

private void OnCompositionChanged(object sender, DwmEventArgs e)
{
// Update the UI on composition change (extend glass if DWM is enabled, otherwise restore)
if (Dwm.Glass[this].Enabled)
Dwm.Glass[this].Margins = new DwmMargins(100, 4, 8, 20);
else
Dwm.Glass[this].Restore();
}

private void OnColorizationChanged(object sender, DwmEventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(e.Colorization.ToString());
}

Although the public DWM API does not make it easy for one to change the colorization programmatically, DwmWrapper exposes this functionality through the Dwm.Colorization property. Controlling the Desktop Window Manager is also as easy as setting Dwm.Composition.Enabled to the desired value, either true or false. Other useful “one-liners” include invoking Windows Flip and Flip 3D: Dwm.Flip3D.EnterAltTab(); and Dwm.Flip3D.Enter();, respectively.

You can tinker with the full GlassLib source code and the included test projects to see how all of the aforementioned features work in a real environment. In the next part I am going to cover the more advanced functionality of the wrapper, the Windows Forms test app and how it manages DWM thumbnails.

If you have any comments, questions, wishes or just an opinion, feel free to post it here.

Part 2 coming soon…

You are free to use GlassLib in your freeware programs, but please at least acknowledge it in your release notes/about dialog/website. In case your program is commercial/shareware, I would appreciate it if you could contact me beforehand. Thanks.