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Ever felt like having a transparent window background and still opaque controls inside the window? It can be easily done in wpf.

1. Set the window’s AllowsTransparency to True
2. Set the window’s Background to Transparent
3. Add a Rectangle to the parent panel of the window
4. Set the opacity of the rectangle to some value < 1 (0.7, …)
5. Add your controls to the parent panel
6. You are one step away form seeing a transparent background with opaque controls on top of it. Go ahead, run the application now

Sample window,

<Window x:Class=”BackgroundWindow.Transparent.Samples.WPF.Window1″
xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation”
xmlns:x=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml”
Title=”Window1″ Height=”300″ Width=”300″ AllowsTransparency=”True” Background=”Transparent” WindowStyle=”None”>
<Grid>
<Rectangle Fill=”Gray” Opacity=”0.7″ />
<Button Width=”100″ Height=”100″>Click this on</Button>
</Grid>
</Window>

Tags: Tips 'n' Tricks, UI, Window, WPF, xaml

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 9:34 am and is filed under Tips 'n' Tricks, UI, WPF, xaml. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.