winapi - How to use LayeredWindows properly

Question

I am haveing trouble understanding the concept of the UpdateLayaredWindow api, how it works and how to implement it. Say for example I want to override CFrameWnd and draw a custom, alpha blended frame with UpdateLayeredWindow, as I understand it, the only way to draw child controls is to either: Blend them to the frame's Bitmap buffer (Created with CreateCompatibleBitmap) and redraw the whole frame, or create another window that sits ontop of the layered frame and draws child controls regularly (which defeats the whole idea of layered windows, because the window region wouldn't update anyway).

If I use the first method, the whole frame is redrawn - surely this is inpractical for a large application..? Or is it that the frame is constantly updated anyway so modifying the bitmap buffer wouldn't cause extra redrawing.

An example of a window similar to what I would like to achieve is the Skype notification box/incoming call box. A translucent frame/window with child contorls sitting ontop, that you can move around the screen.

In a practical, commercial world, how do I do it? Please don't refer me to the documentation, I know what it says; I need someone to explain practical methods of the infrastructure I should use to implement this.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It is very unclear exactly what aspect of layered windows gives you a problem, I'll just noodle on about how they are implemented and explaining their limitations from that.

Layered windows are implemented by using a hardware feature of the video adapter called "layers". The adapter has the basic ability to combine the pixels from distinct chunks of video memory, mixing them before sending them to the monitor. Obvious examples of that are the mouse cursor, it gets super-imposed on the pixels of the desktop frame buffer so it doesn't take a lot of effort to animate it when you move the mouse. Or the overlay used to display a video, the video stream decoder writes the video pixels directly to a separate frame buffer. Or the shadow cast by the frame of a toplevel window on top of the windows behind it.

The video adapter allows a few simple logical operations on the two pixel values when combining their values. The first one is an obvious one, the mixing operation that lets some of the pixel value overlap the background pixel. That effect provides opacity, you can see the background partially behind the window.

The second one is color-keying, the kind of effect you see used when the weather man on TV stands in front of a weather map. He actually stands in front of a green screen, the camera mixing panel filters out the green and replaces it with the pixels from the weather map. That effect provides pure transparency.

You see this back in the arguments passed to UpdateLayeredWindow(), the function you must call in your code to setup the layered window. The dwFlags argument select the basic operations supported by the video hardware, ULW_ALPHA flag enables the opacity effect, the ULW_COLORKEY flag enables the transparency effect. The transparency effect requires the color key, that's specified with the crKey argument value. The opacity effect is controlled with the pblend argument. This one is built for future expansion, one that hasn't happened yet. The only interesting field in the BLENDFUNCTION struct is SourceConstantAlpha, it controls the amount of opacity.

So a basic effect available for a layered window is opacity, overlapping the background windows and leaving the partially visible. One restriction to that the entire window is partially opaque, including the border and the title bar. That doesn't look good, you typically want to create a borderless window and take on the burden of creating your own window frame. Requires a bunch of code btw.

And a basic effect is transparency, completely hiding parts of a window. You often want to combine the two effects and that requires two layered windows. One that provides the partial opacity, another on top and owned by the bottom one that displays the parts of the window that are opaque, like the controls. Using the color key to make its background transparent and make the the bottom window visible.

Beyond this, another important feature for custom windows is enabled by SetWindowRgn(). It lets you give the window a shape other than a rectangle. Again it is important to omit the border and title bar, they don't work on a shaped window. The programming effort is to combine these features in a tasteful way that isn't too grossly different from the look-and-feel of windows created by other applications and write the code that paints the replacement window parts and still makes the window functional like a regular window. Things like resizing and moving the window for example, you typically do so by custom handling the WM_NCHITTEST message.