Kam VedBrat : Aero

Keeping the taskbar transparent when your deskband is enabled

KamVedBrat — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:51:05 GMT

If you have code that implements a deskband for the Windows Taskbar in Windows Vista, you may have noticed that it causes the taskbar to appear opaque when there is not a maximized window open, instead of being transparent, but darkly tinted which is the normal state of the taskbar.

You can get around this by implementing the IDeskBand2 interface and responding to the associated methods appropriately.

Mary Jo Foley says Leopard looks like Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:46:18 GMT

When we did the visuals for Vista, we worked really hard to get a to a look and feel that was streamlined, efficient, and modern. We knew people would compare what we're doing to what other companies do, but I never expected this.

Scott Hanselman looks at Vista task switching applications

KamVedBrat — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:42:16 GMT

Scott wrote a quick review of some different Task Switching applications that have been written for Windows Vista using the new window thumbnail preview API's that are part of Windows Vista's desktop composition system.

Why Intel 915 graphics don’t have a WDDM driver for Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:36:15 GMT

A common question among folks who are upgrading to Windows Vista on slightly older notebooks, tablet PC's, and UMPC's is why the Intel 915 graphics chipset doesn't have WDDM support, as WDDM support is a prerequisite for Desktop Composition. The folks over at the Intel software blog have posted a video with the answer to this question. Follow the link to get the answer straight from the proverbial horse's mouth.

iTunes & Quicktime and Aero

KamVedBrat — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:40:00 GMT

I made a post about a year ago regarding how some applications have a side effect of disabling Aero. While it is still possible to create applications that have this side-effect (due to the underlying problem of applications accessing the primary display buffer directly), many of the applications that exhibited this behavior during the Beta process of Windows Vista have since been updated by their respective ISV's to no longer cause this.

The folks at Apple have done a great job specifically with updating iTunes and Quicktime prevent this problem, as well as several other Vista-specific issues that customers were hitting. If you grab the latest versions of these applications form Apple, you'll have a much better experience.

Back on Channel 9!

KamVedBrat — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:04:10 GMT

In late December, I sat down for another interview on Channel 9. It took a little while to "bake" over the holidays, but it finally got posted about a week ago.

I know some folks are asking for the source code for the demo that was shown, you can download it from here. This sample was based on some code that was written for other demos we did internally, so if the part of code to extend glass into the window looks familiar, that is why.

There's been some lively discussion on the thread, so I'll take a moment to address some of the comments.

DigitalDud mentioned the need for new display drivers to do composition. I've talked about the benefits of composition in the past, but it's worth discussing the new driver model briefly. The new driver model is really a separate thing from Desktop Composition.

With the new driver model, the biggest change was moving a great deal of code out of kernel mode into user mode. There were meny motivations for this - including, but no limited to One motivation behind this was that video drivers are increasingly doing a great deal more language processing than they had in the past, due to new functionality like shader processing at the pixel level and for geometry. Moving this processing up into user mode means it's less likey that an application can cause the driver to crash in kernel mode - in other words, far fewer blue screens.

Desktop composition does take advantage of the new driver model, in that it enables better support for more than one application using the GPU simultaneously, sharing graphics memory, and managing graphics memory together.

DCMonkey asked about resize behavior. The biggest challenge with improving resize behavior is application compatibilty. For new apps, like those written in WPF, we had more latitude to change what happened in the application by default when you resize it. In WPF, you don't manage your DC or your DX surface directly - the framework does that for you. So we can make sure that the framework does something "DWM friendly". For existing Win32 applications, and even some Windows Forms applications, we need to make sure that we don't do things that change the expectations that applications already have. Some applications do processing on the resize loop by listening for and reacting to WM_SIZE messages. Sometimes those applications don't get that work done in less than 16ms (which would be required to do a resize at 60FPS assuming no system overhead). And of course, the system does have overhead so the applications don't really get their whole 16ms - what they get varies from system to system based on hardware.

There are a number of approaches that can be taken to keep these things in sync and looking smooth - one way to do it is to not update the window frame until the contents of the window have drawn. The downside to this, is that then the window updates will lag behind the mouse-pointer movement. Apple's OSX exhibits this behavior pretty commonly (at least Tiger does on the Mac Mini we have in the office). Another approach is to have the window frame track the mouse, and use a default brush to fill the new window area until the window gets around to repainting - that's what we do in Windows Vista.

If the application chooses to draw glitchy stuff in that resize loop, there's not a lot we can do. The one thing we can do is focus on making sure that the amount of processing that happens in DWM.exe during resize is minimal, and we spent a great deal of effort on that front.

There was some discussion of .NET 2.0 executable shipping in Windows Vista. It's true, there are none (to my knowledge). That doesn't mean that Microsoft isn't investing in great experiences built on the .NET framework. The Max project was probably our first major public endavour in building a great user experience on .NET. That project has closed now, but there are other things happening as well. There are the Expression tools, and there's also the new Windows Live for TV Beta, which is an extension to Media Center on Windows Vista that was built using the framework. I'm sure there are more things like this coming as well.

Thanks for all the great questions & comments on the interview. Its always fun to do these, and be able to participate in discussions like this!

USA Today on the Windows Vista Upgrade Experience

KamVedBrat — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 22:43:43 GMT

In the USA Today Personal Technology Column this week, Ed Baig talks about his experience upgrading to Windows Vista. He has some really complementary comments about Aero in this write-up:

The Aero interface is handsome. Users will appreciate translucent edges, live thumbnail images that appear over taskbar items you mouse over, and a 3D effect that lets you use the mouse scroll wheel to flip through a stack of open windows. You can also hit Alt + Tab to flip through windows.

Thanks Ed!

Instant Viewer & Intellipoint Software for Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:37:00 GMT

The new Intellipoint Software for Windows Vista has a great feature that builds on the DWM API called "Instant Viewer". It allows you to remap the click-wheel to bring up a grid view of all your open Windows like this:

Report on the performance impact of Desktop Composition

KamVedBrat — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 13:26:47 GMT

Ars Technica picked up a report on a study on Windows Vista performance that was conducted at Principled Technologies, a technology assessment company in North Carolina. There's lots of good data in the study about the performance of Windows Vista on a handful of different hardware platforms. One of the highlights for me was reading that they observed very little impact on responsiveness with Aero enabled.

They indicate in their report that of the 192 measurements conducted, only 4 were a tenth of a second slower w/ Aero enabled, only 2 were slower than half a second, and handful of tests yielded greater responsiveness with Aero enabled.

Heuristics for enabling Aero

KamVedBrat — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 01:27:22 GMT

If you're a system builder or just building a pc for yourself, and you want to make sure that your PC can run Aero, you'll be interested in this document. It describes the heuristics the operating system uses to enable Aero, and outlines some troubleshooting steps for getting Aero up and running if it doesn't work for you as expected.

colorization improvements for maximized windows

KamVedBrat — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 10:04:00 GMT

One question (complaint really) we've gotten for quite some time with Windows Vista has been that customers who select a custom color for their windows lose that color when the window is maximized.

Well - we fixed that - the next RC build of Windows Vista will maintain your color in the darkened maximized windows!

Dave has posted some screenshots and background behind this decision over on the shell blog.

exposé using DWM API

KamVedBrat — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:37:00 GMT

Greg Schecter has been blogging extensively about the DWM API's in Windows Vista lately. It's definitely worth a look, as he does a great job outlining the possibility of what you can do using the DWM on Windows Vista.

One great example I saw recently was created by someone I only know as "Simon on .Net", who built an implementation of Apple's Exposé feature from OSX on top of the DWM in Windows Vista. Nice!

Dissecting my WinHEC talk

KamVedBrat — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:35:00 GMT

I got an email recently about a post on a third-party discussion board regarding my talk at WinHEC.

This made me chuckle. I assume it’s the zoom-in on the caption buttons that’s being questioned there.

I’m pretty sure if you look up my slide deck from WinHEC 2005 you’ll find the same image in there as well (but bigger). That picture was created to help communicate the difference between the transparent and opaque glass looks that we had planned. There was a matching opaque picture that didn’t get used this year because it wasn’t really relevant.

In any case – that picture was done as an illustration to communicate what it would look like, it’s not a screenshot of anything.

I love hearing all the excitement about the vector graphics capabilities in Windows Presentation Foundation and the pieces of it we used to build Aero.

For Windows Vista, we elected not to use vectors in how the rendering of the window frames works, for a number of reasons. We had a pre-existing designer workflow using bitmaps which we didn’t want to mess with, considering we needed it for other areas of the product. The WPF vector tools (the Expression stuff) were still in development, and even if they were ready, since we weren’t using WPF directly there would have been an additional layer of work to accommodate those that we didn’t want to take on.

update- 12/20/2006: cleaned up some wierd color tags in this post.

Hope this clears up the discussion.