Visual Foxpro does Glass!
The Windows Vista CPT is out and is being downloaded desperately by whoever has the bandwidth. One of the "eye candy" items of Vista themes is something called Glass Forms. When applied, it gives an effect that the form is transparent - like glass.
However don't rush out and set this up since your current graphics card may not support its requirements. Also it is a huge resource hog and recommendations are that only a small part of the window should be glassed.
So what should we others who are using XP do then? Will VFP support or have support for these effects as we have theme support now? Who knows.
Anyway I just wanted to show here some eyecandy I am working on in Visual Foxpro 9 in my spare time. This is very very BETA still, but opens up some exciting possibilities, especially since this runs on plain old XP and boring old Visual Foxpro!
If anyone is interested in further developing on this idea, drop me a line and we can take it from there.
Without further ado here are some screen shots from my VFP environment. The background was a temporary setting just to show off the "GLASS" effect. At the moment I can move the form around but the effect is a bit choppy. There are also some issues with ACTIVATE etc.
Remember this is my Beta form running in XP, not Vista and some high end graphics card.
Mostly remember this is Visual Foxpro.
The Fox Rocks!
The following screens are NOT running in Vista but are running in vanilla XP. No animals were harmed in the production of this effect and neither were any special themes used. This is all pure VFP. Click the images to see a larger version.
VFP Glass form
VFP Transparent Form
Notice that ALL objects are transparent. Not very nice looking.
Another view of the Glass form. All controls are opaque.
16/06/2006
There appears to be some confusion as to what represents a "Glass" effect.
The VFP Transparent sample is just that - a semi Transparent form using the API SetLayeredWindowsAttributes, and can be achieved with just 4 lines of code to a couple of API's. That is not "Glass", just "Transparent"
Glass as used in reference to Vista forms, is where part of the form is transparent and other parts are not. All objects you place on a transparent form will themselves assume the same transparency as the parent form. This is not so in Glass forms.WIth a glass form they will remain Opaque