Metro Theme rendering issues

Hi Ulf,

I run two monitors as well and the Sample Browser in Metro theme resizes fine for me on both monitors.  Perhaps try upgrading your graphics card drivers and see if that helps?  Sometimes that has helped fix glitches in WPF rendering in the past.

Hello,

thank you for your quick response - unfortunately my graphics card driver was fine ;)

But we did some additional testing and found out that this problem occurs when you don't use aero  (e.g. switch to basic / classic design or high contrast).

Hello,

I set on high contrast theme in Windows 8.1 and ran the Sample Browser.  I tried resizing and maximizing the main Sample Browser window in both monitors and it worked ok for me.

Can you try the latest version to see if it happens for you there?  You said you were on an older version before.

If it still happens, please give the exact steps to reproduce it.  Thanks!

Hello,

Thank you for your quick reply. The Problem only occurs with Windows 7.

We also tried with the latest version of your sample browser (2013.2 build 0591), still the same.

Thank you!

Hi UIf,

We were able to reproduce it with these settings:

• Windows 7 (doesn't happen in Windows 8+)
• Aero Basic (doesn't happen with Aero enabled)
• Second monitor attached (doesn't happen on primary monitor)

We spent a while on this today but were not able to find a good solution.  The problem that appears is that when using the outer glow to resize the window in the specific scenario above, something goes wonky with the window rendering that seems rather low-level.  it's almost like the double buffer maintained by WPF gets messed up.

We did find that if you set HasOuterGlow="False" on your WindowChrome instance, it will not run into the problem.  The outer glow is a second Window that has AllowsTransparency="True" and sits behind the themed window, but only in Metro themes.  It tracks the main themed window and resizes/moves with it.  When the end user clicks on the outer glow, our code initiates a resize operation start on the main themed window instead.  But something in Windows 7 (again only in the specific scenario above) seems to not like that having the AllowsTransparency window around for some reason.  It's odd that it works fine on the primary monitor but not on the second.  Our rendering code doesn't change based on monitor setup, so it seems like something in Microsoft's code is broken in that scenario.

Hi,

we used your workaround and everything works fine now. :)

The handling suffered a little bit, because the space around the window, where resizing is possible is smaller - but we can live with this for now. It occurs after all only under very specific circumstances.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Hello,

we have the same problem with the RibbonWindow. We don't want to disable the metro theme, when Aero is disabled (currently the only solution)

Is there a similar solution like the HasOuterGlow Property?

Hi Thomas,

Yes if in your RibbonWindow code-behind, you get the WindowChrome instance it's using via WindowChrome.GetChrome(this), you then can modify the HasOuterGlow property on it.

Hi,

thanks for your quick response. This works.