Christian Graus wrote: I'm not sure how you'd go about getting the DC to draw directing to the desktop, however, am I right in thinking that's what you want ? Actually, I don't want to draw on the desktop but on top of my own application across several separate controls, basically to display a box around an area to draw attention to it. I tried walking through the nested controls on my form, but you can only draw in their client areas, which in some cases doe not cover the entire control (e.g. Edit boxes and list boxes with borderstyle "Fixed3D"). Hence I felt forced to revert to old GDI.

Nader Elshehabi wrote: You can store your texts in a string table, or even an array for whatever it's worth!! The point is that I do not know WHICH languages I will encounter. Therefore, I can never make a 'complete' list of button texts (if I had that many dictionaries anyway). In order to make it work for ANY language I will need to ask Windows for the button texts. Anyway, Guffa has pointed me into another direction. Thanks though.

Could I get an example of how to do this, I have never used Interop before.

Andrew Lygin wrote: Just define your own Paint event with the "new" keyword and add logic to "add" and "remove" accessors. Perhaps a bit overkill if you just want some information about an event, but worth considering if you want to manipulate the event (although I suppose you don't really want to mess too much with a crucial event like Paint). Thanks anyway, Andrew. I'm sure your it'll come in handy someday.

Oops...I guess I should have read your post more thoroughly. :-O

I want to store the application window position (including these "pre-maximized settings") ONLY when the application is shutting down so that I can show it the same way the next time the application is started. But you're right, I could store and update the information every time the window is resized or moved except when it is maximized. I was just wondering if the framework of System.Windows.Form does this somehow for me.

Thanks. I will look into it right away!

leppie wrote: As I read today, the Cursor class only supports black and white cursors. If it is the case that the Cursor class only supports black and white cursors, it changes the nature of my question from 'what am I doing wrong' to 'how can I display coloured cursors'. As Heath Stewart quite justly comments, let me show me what I've done sofar to create, load and display my cursor. I created the cursor with Visual Studio 6.0. (By the way, earlier I created one by selecting "Cursor file" from the "Add New Item" dialog in Visual Studio .Net 2003 but that file appears to be an icon instead of a cursor. In the Properties Window it says "Icon Editor" and the hotspot tool is disabled. My old Visual Studio 6.0 recognised the file as an icon, too. I guess this may be a bug in Visual Studio .Net 2003 and I probably need an update for it. This is a different matter, however.) Anyway, this 16-coloured cursor works fine in a C++ 6.0 project. I also tested one of the coloured cursors that comes with WindowsXP; it also is displayed in monochrome, so I think we can discard the cursor file itself as the problem. I embedded the cursor by setting the Build Action to Embedded Resource. I declare the cursor: private Cursor MyCursor; and in the constructor of my user control I load it: System.Reflection.Assembly ThisDll = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); System.IO.Stream TheRes; TheRes = ThisDll.GetManifestResourceStream("MyNamespace.MyCursor.cur"); MyCursor = new Cursor(TheRes); (I tried using simply MyCursor = new Cursor(this.GetType(), "MyCursor.cur");or MyCursor = new Cursor(this.GetType(), "MyNamespace.MyCursor.cur"); but that didn't work: the dataStream remains empty, apparently.) I asign the cursor (in special cases) to the user control by: this.Cursor = MyCursor; All in all, I'm doing nothing odd, I would say. So where have my wonderful colours gone? I would appreciate anyone's help on this. I cannot believe C# only allows monochrome cursors. Thanks.

I used to struggle with that one too. Here is snippet of how you can do that: protected override bool ProcessCmdKey(ref Message msg, Keys keyData) { if (keyData == Keys.Up) { // key up pressed return true; } return false; }