XamlXaml.com

I still see lots of questions on how to make a main application window transparent or semi-transparent. This was a bit involved in versions of WPF previous to the June CTP and was not very practical because it could not be rendered in hardware. But functionality added to WPF since has made it easy to accomplish and it supports hardware rendering when available. All you need to do is to base your main scene on the Window class and add the following code to the constructor:

this.WindowStyle = WindowStyle.None;
this.AllowsTransparency = true;
this.Background = new SolidColorBrush(System.Windows.Media.Color.FromArgb(0, 34, 34, 34));

Note that the amount of transparency, or more correctly, opaqueness, is set by the alpha channel which is the first number in the FromArgb method. Setting the alpha channel to 1.0 would be 100% opaque. 0 is 0% opaque and .5 is 50% opaque.

-MGE

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 4:18 pm and is filed under WPF, Source Code, C#. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.