logan1337

Aha, my idea of focusing on MouseEnter and unfocusing on MouseLeave seems to work quite well! I discovered the Win32 functions GetForegroundWindow and SetForegroundWindow which proved immensely helpful in these regards. Now to investigate ForceActiveTitlebar to avoid the visual changes...

You'll notice in Paint.NET, that tool tips can occur on both the tool palette and the main form, even though both are technically separate windows. This is essentially what I want to figure out. Perhaps windows are focused on MouseEnter, though with the help of a "rendering trick", there is no change in their appearance.

I don't believe that has anything to do with focus. A form can still be 50% opaque and focused, or 50% and not focused. The behavior that I want is just that of the floating tool windows in Paint.NET, such as the color palette for example, and that is: a) both appear focused (their title bars are of "foreground" color) clicks can occur directly on either window with no visual change c) window ordering does not change (because they are floating) and also ideally d) no Activated/Deactivated events are fired unless an external window is activated. For example, tool tips only appear on focused windows. I would like tool tips to be able to appear for both the main window and the floating window in my application. I will investigate the PdnBaseForm class at some point, though I am busy with other things at the moment.

I took a look, but the answer wasn't readily apparent... does anyone happen to know off-hand? The best I could come up with was calling mainwindow.Focus() on Click or ResizeEnd event, but that does nothing really to allow both windows to be focused, which is what I really want.

Ah, I didn't realize it was available. :oops:

Hi, I'm a .NET developer and I was hoping you might be able to tell me how you managed to get the floating tool windows in Paint.NET to avoid stealing the focus of the main window when they are active. I would like to apply this same functionality to my program but it always seems that clicking a floating (TopMost) window always unfocuses my other, main window.