How to make a click- and see-through 'always on top'-window

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+2 Q:

How to make a click- and see-through 'always on top'-window

I want to display an semi-transparent always-on-top window with some information, but I do not want this window to take input or receive focus. All mouse-clicks should go to the underlaying window.

I remember seeing this in a shell-replacement application years back, but I can't remeber witch.

Any Ideas how to achieve this effect with delphi or c#?

Update:

I can't quite get the proposed solution to work with delphi. Returning HTTRANSPARENT for the NCHITTEST-message will stop all mousemessages reaching the form, but it want pass it down to the next window in z-order. Is this method ment to work across processes, or is it only ment to work on childelements of a spesific window?

If I set the ExStyle flag WS_EX_TRANSPARENT, though, all mouseclicks will travel through into the next window, but I will not get the NCHITTEST-message at all, and will not be able to control where the windows should be click-through or not...

+5 A:

This StackOverflow thread should answer your question hopefully.

Noldorin 2009-02-09 12:27:26

Thanks! I shall try this out as soon as possible. I will also try to be better at searching... :-)

Vegar 2009-02-09 12:33:08

Note: This will only be click-through where the window is transparent. If you have, say, a label or image of some sort, these would not be click through.

configurator 2009-02-09 14:09:02

I'm not sure about that actually - have you tested it? If so, you can still get around that issue by intercepting *all* Windows messages for the application and returning that hit test result.

Noldorin 2009-02-09 14:24:36

ansaurus

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How to make a click- and see-through 'always on top'-window

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