What can I do about maximized, styled windows, which show their borders on adjacent monitors?

Question

On a multi-monitor system, a "blank" VCL application maximizes fine, but the same application with styles enabled (and one chosen as default) maximizes incorrectly. What I'm seeing is the right-hand edge of the window extend onto the 2nd monitor (my main is on the left). When I started comparing to other Windows apps, I noticed that under Windows 7 (at least), maximized windows do not even have non-client borders on the left, right or bottom sides. And indeed, the standard VCL (non-styled) app behaves this same way, without non-client borders.

How do I fix this? I notice that TFormStyleHook has a handler for WMNCCalcSize, which I haven't dissected yet, but makes me wonder if VCL might be incorrectly handling this message for a maximized window.

Answer 1

After fiddling some time on this, my take is, this is not a vcl-styles bug at all. This indeed is related with the behavior in the article mentioned in a comment to the question by mghie.

The specific behavior is that, the size of a maximized window is larger than the work area of the monitor that the window is maximized on. Supposedly, the window manager hides the overhang borders. Apparently, it doesn't quite do so with customized frames. Note that MSDN's own custom window frame example seems to suffer from the same problem (refer to the post titled "Bug when window is Maximized " in community content). VCL's application is different than the MSDN example in that it's not based on DWM, but I still think it is the same issue.

The overhang borders have the size of the system sizing border (SM_C[X|Y]SIZEFRAME), but this is irrelevant to the workaround below as it disregards the OS suggested size/position and uses the work area.

Unfortunately I don't think this workaround is usable at all. For one, the mentioned behavior is not documented, for two, the workaround is not perfect; there's still an odd pixel out. If you snap the window exactly on the work area, the window manager decides to offset the window to where it thinks the window (with hidden frames) should be placed. (The VCL could probably be modified to do what the window manager does, and take into account overhang and do not draw them or something similar, but it would be more work and it still would be to workaround undocumented behavior..)

Anyway;

type   TForm1 = class(TForm)     ..   protected     // overriding styles is not necessary since TFormStyleHook.WMGetMinMaxInfo     // first calls the default window procedure      procedure WMGetMinMaxInfo(var Message: TWMGetMinMaxInfo);       message WM_GETMINMAXINFO;  ..  procedure TForm1.WMGetMinMaxInfo(var Message: TWMGetMinMaxInfo); var   R: TRect; begin   // always arrives with MinMaxInfo.ptMaxPosition = (-SM_CXFRAME, -SM_CYFRAME)   // and MinMaxInfo.ptMaxSize = (PrimaryMonitor.Width (?) + 2 * SM_CXFRAME, ... )   inherited;    // should test for OS, styles etc. before running the below    R := Monitor.WorkareaRect;   InflateRect(R, -1, -1);             // odd pixel   OffsetRect(R, -Monitor.Left, -Monitor.Top);   Message.MinMaxInfo.ptMaxPosition := R.TopLeft;   Message.MinMaxInfo.ptMaxSize := Point(R.Width, R.Height); end;