See here[^] for the answer.

Anyone ever tried to get additional areas of glass on an mdi form?

I have managed to make use of the DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea in Vista/7 to extend the glass effect into a form. However I cannot get this to happen on a form which is set as an mdi container. The glass portion just doesn't draw any more - it appears white. Note I'm not talking about the children inside the mdi parent, but on the actual main form itself. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get this working?

I can very easily extend the glass area of a normal form by calling the DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea method. However I now have a requirement in which I need an MDI container/parent to have glass extended into the form. If the IsMdiContainer property is set to true, the part that is meant to be glass is white. Anybody have any experience with this issue?

Has any one created a Listbox type control similar to the one that is found in the Firefox Download screen? Or something similar? I'd really appreciate the help!

Hmmm. I increased the buffer size from 1024 to 4096 and everything seems to work perfectly now.

Packets are lost due to this under high load. I'm out of ideas.

Problem seems to be here. Not sure I understand why...

            if (nameLen > 0)
                strName = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(data, 12, nameLen);
            else
                strName = null;

As far as I can tell, I get the error after executing the following commands: In the OnAccept method..

            byte\[\] bufData = new byte\[1024\];
            clientSocket.BeginReceive(bufData, 0, bufData.Length, SocketFlags.None, new AsyncCallback(OnReceive),
                                      new object\[\] {clientSocket, bufData});

In the OnReceive method..

Socket clientSocket = null;
Data msgReceived = null;
byte[] bufData = new byte[1024];
bool bypass = false;
ClientInfo cInfo = null;

        try
        {
            bool blInvalidClient = false;

            try
            {
                object\[\] oData = (object\[\]) ar.AsyncState;
                clientSocket = (Socket) oData\[0\];
                bufData = (byte\[\]) oData\[1\];
                clientSocket.EndReceive(ar);

                //Console.WriteLine(clientList.Count);
            }
            catch (SocketException)
            {
                blInvalidClient = true;
            }

            if (!blInvalidClient)
            {
                //Transform the array of bytes received from the user into an
                //intelligent form of object Data
                msgReceived = Packet.PacketReceived(bufData);

...

The Packet.PacketReceived method returns new Data(bufData). I've added traces in that constructor and there is something incorrect happening. All clients that communicate use the same Data class to convert the info into a byte[] so it's not as if I'm sending an arb string of bytes to the socket. But the weird thing is that this only ever happens when I sent lots of packets to the socket at once.

Forms do weird things when you make them transparent from my experiences.

I've highly modified the code found here http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/ChatAsynchTCPSockets.aspx. When creating a packet, I give the following class the info it needs onto which is converts it into a byte[] and visa versa which can then be sent and received by a socket respectively.

public class Data
{
    //Default constructor
    public Command cmdCommand; //Command type (login, logout, send message, etcetera)
    public string strMessage; //Message text
    public string strName; //Name by which the client logs into the room

    public Data()
    {
        cmdCommand = Command.Null;
        strMessage = null;
        strName = null;
    }

    //Converts the bytes into an object of type Data
    public Data(byte\[\] data)
    {
        //The first four bytes are for the Command
        cmdCommand = (Command)BitConverter.ToInt32(data, 0);

        //The next four store the length of the name
        int nameLen = BitConverter.ToInt32(data, 4);

        //The next four store the length of the message
        int msgLen = BitConverter.ToInt32(data, 8);

        //This check makes sure that strName has been passed in the array of bytes
        if (nameLen > 0)
            strName = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(data, 12, nameLen);
        else
            strName = null;

        //This checks for a null message field
        if (msgLen > 0)
            strMessage = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(data, 12 + nameLen, msgLen);
        else
            strMessage = null;
    }

    //Converts the Data structure into an array of bytes
    public byte\[\] ToByte()
    {
        List result = new List();

        //First four are for the Command
        result.AddRange(BitConverter.GetBytes((int)cmdCommand));

        //Add the length of the name
        if (strName != null)
            result.AddRange(BitConverter.GetBytes(strName.Length));
        else
            result.AddRange(BitConverter.GetBytes(0));

        //Length of the message
        if (strMessage != null)
            result.AddRange(BitConverter.GetBytes(Encoding.UTF8.GetByteCount(strMessage)));
        else
            result.AddRange(BitConverter.GetBytes(0));

        //Add the name
        if (strName !=

I've tried that. My problem is making the form's background disappear. I cannot get rid of the grey square (default form background color). So to do that I override the paintbackground method but that then draws black wherever the transparency is meant to be. Whether double buffered or not. It definitely draws black in the transparency when changing Opacity :/

   private void form\_KeyDown(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
    {
        // shortcuts
        if (e.Control && e.KeyCode == Keys.S)
            // do action

I'm trying to make a splash screen with the following requirements: 1) Must fade in and fade out (issues) 2) Fades in before main program form is open and fades out once it is (done this) 3) Displays an image which is not squash and has transparency (issues) So I've looked on the net and I'm still struggling with some aspects if anyone can assist. Fading the form is trivial (by setting the Opacity), however getting a form to be transparent (to work with the pictures transparency) and then fading that in and out is a mess. I have tried numerous methods, such as overriding OnPaintBackground, changing the style of a form to allow a transparent background and a few other things. The problems I hit are: - When fading the transparent form, by changing the Opacity the transparent bits turn black - When the splash screen first shows it paints properly, but when the main form is finally loaded the transparent bits of the splash screen still show what was there before the form loaded (i.e. not repainting or something). At the moment some of the code I have looks like this:

    protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e)
    {
        // Do nothing here!
    }

    protected override void OnPaintBackground(PaintEventArgs e)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("paintBackground");
        Graphics gfx = e.Graphics;
        gfx.DrawImage(global::DesktopLiveDotNet.Properties.Resources.splash\_screen, new Rectangle(0, 0, Width, Height));
    }

But when it starts to fade the transparency turns black:

    private void timer1\_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Opacity = fOpacity / 100;
        
        Application.DoEvents();
        fOpacity -= StepVal;

        if (fOpacity <= 0)
        {
            timer1.Stop();
            Close();
        }
    }

Not quite sure how to proceed and any ideas would be great! :)