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A Couple of Cool Uses of the DWM Thumbnail APIs

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I've seen a couple of cool uses in the past week of the DWM Thumbnail API (described in my previous post) and wanted to share them here.

"Simon on the .NET" wrote a great-looking Exposé-like mini-app that, when you press F12, shows a representation of all the desktop windows in a grid.  The original desktop is shown behind the grid.  The thumbnails are, as expected, live and updating (though they don't accept input, as is true with DWM thumbnails in general).

Douglas Stockwell wrote a cool WPF application that PInvoke's to the thumbnail APIs and populates a WPF ItemsControl with thumbnails of windows as you click on them.  As it stands, it has no particular purpose, but it shows some interesting integration between WPF and DWM thumbnails.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2006
    Un petit message pour faire de la pub à un ami développeur, Simon (qui n'arrete pas de me harceler pour...

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2006
    I started exploring interactions between DirectDraw and DWM. Two effects of DirectDraw going straight to the write-only video buffer seem to be that WM_NCCALCSIZE must return WVR_REDRAW and ScrollWindowEx cannot be used in DirectDraw windows.

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2006
    Super duper cool and it works.

  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2006
    The thumbnail API uses HWNDs.  Is there any way to render a static image of a window as a 32-bit HBITMAP, including the alpha values for that specific window, without using an HWND?

  • Anonymous
    October 02, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2006
    Using Application Thumbnails in Vista

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2008
    PingBack from http://games-money.com/wow-fr/2008/09/18/my-expose-a-mac-os-x-expose-implementation-for-windows-vista-update/