I am designing a window that is always on screen and around 20% opaque. It is designed to be a sort of status window, so it is always on top, but I want people to be able to click through the window to any other application below. Here's the opaque window sitting on top of this SO post as I type right now:
See that grey bar? It would prevent me from typing in the tags box at the moment.
You can make a window, click-through by adding WS_EX_LAYERED
and WS_EX_TRANSPARENT
styles to its extended styles. Also to make it always on top set its TopMost
to true
and to make it semi-transparent use suitable Opacity
value:
using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
this.Opacity = 0.5;
this.TopMost = true;
}
[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
static extern int GetWindowLong(IntPtr hWnd, int nIndex);
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern int SetWindowLong(IntPtr hWnd, int nIndex, int dwNewLong);
const int GWL_EXSTYLE = -20;
const int WS_EX_LAYERED = 0x80000;
const int WS_EX_TRANSPARENT = 0x20;
protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnLoad(e);
var style = GetWindowLong(this.Handle, GWL_EXSTYLE);
SetWindowLong(this.Handle,GWL_EXSTYLE , style | WS_EX_LAYERED | WS_EX_TRANSPARENT);
}
}
Sample Result
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