Keep Window Looking Active

Question

I'm working on a taskbar for secondary monitors. I have it working fairly well. I've also got the aero blur look working as well. But my question is probably not related to the aero stuff.

What i want to do is to have my taskbar window to always appear focused/activated. It does not need to actually be focused or activated, I just want it to look that way. You can see the effect I'm after by just putting a setforgroundwindow call in the app idle. But I can't use that as I don't really want it grabbing the focus like that. I just want it to always look the way it does when it does have focus.

I've tried all sorts of WM_XXX message calls, both trapping and sending, I've tried setwindowpos calls, and on and on. The only thing that has worked is calling Mouse_Event(MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTDOWN and then Mouse_Event(MOUSEEVENTF_LEFTUP. I don't like this solution though as it's a really cheesy hack/workaround to what I want to do. But whatever gets called with the Mouse_Event is essentially what I need to make happen only without actually clicking on my app or sending it Mouse_Event calls.

Answer 1

You don't say what language you are working in or whether this is managed or unmanaged code.

For C++ unmanaged code, you just handle the WM_NCACTIVATE message and force it to always seem active, like this:

case WM_NCACTIVATE:
   {
   // wParam tells us whether we are active or inactive, but we are going to ignore
   // that and always pass active down to DefWindowProc so it will draw us active.
   DefWindowProc(hwnd, uMsg, TRUE, lParam);
   //return FALSE; // returning false here prevents actual deactivation
   return TRUE; // return true allows deactivation (even though we draw as active)
   }
   break;

edit: the solution in delphi code (moved from comment to make it more readable)

procedure TForm1.WndProc(var Message: TMessage); 
begin inherited; 
  if (Message.Msg = WM_NCACTIVATE) then 
  begin 
    DefWindowProc(handle, Message.Msg, 1, Message.LParam ); 
    Message.Result := 1; 
  end; 
end;