diablo75

Hi there. First post, so I'm gonna be rusty.

For starts, I'm not a programmer. But I am working with a friend of mine on a program, I do the graphical side of things, and we've kind of had some problems trying to make an app visual studio 2005, and considering going back to VB6.

I want to create an interface that has rounded corners and a soft drop shadow on the desktop. Originally, we were going to attempt to do the entire thing in Studio 2005, but after we exported a working version, we found that installing the .NET framework on a users computer would be required in order for the software to work. Personally, I don't feel it to be very nice to force a user to wait 10 minutes while this excess baggage is installed. This was a big strike against using studio 2005 to develop this software...

Here's what the plan was originally:

Every element of the program was drawn up and saved as PNG's because of their alpha channel support, making custom shapes easy. But we started to run into problems when we tried to do things like create a splash screen out of a PNG that has it's own soft drop shadow included in the source PNG graphic, and then have that fade onto the users desktop....fading back out, and fade in a similarly shaped interface. Transparency is apparently an issue on some displays, depending on their color depth. Yet another strike (in my eyes) against using VB.NET 2005.

So, I'm wondering if there is a way to make an irregularly shaped windows form made entirely out of a graphic, that might possible render a soft drop shadow behind the form. And perhaps allow the user to drag it around the screen freely too, but that's not absolutely necessary. And to do it all in VB6, because it just seems to be like something simple enough that VB6 could do...

Thanks for the help and feedback in advanced!

Booooze

VB6 wasn't much good with transparency's. You could try making it with DirectX, but then the user has to have DX runtimes installed, which is a downside for a simple applications 'eye candy'. Your best bet would be VB.NET anyways, or at least some kind of .NET language. If it's a Microsoft language, it needs runtime files anyways. VB6 will need the VB6 runtimes to be installed. .NET Languages will need the .NET framework. If you plan on releasing this for Windows XP and Vista, you might as well use a .NET language because Vista comes with .NET installed anyways, and I don't know anyone who has XP and doesn't have .NET framework 1.1 (for the least). Other than using the built in transparency's, The only other thing I can thing of is 'Manifest' Files. I don't really know how they work, you'll have to Google them. If I remember correctly, they should let you change the whole style of your form. It may very well help with the transparency issue as well. Perhaps another member will be able to enlighten you on the topic. But when it comes to language choice, I wouldn't bother with VB6 unless your targeting Windows 98 users.