Still looking for help with transparent window

[bjones]

I posted for help earlier and got no replies

I need a transparent form/frame/user control/etc thats located over a video window. Then I want to draw in the transparent window on top of the video(lines etc) using the mouse.

Here is something similar that joaquim posted back in Nov 2008..

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...ht=transparent

Interesting idea...but a little messy due to the mouse events not being accurate on the transparent user control.

I have tried many things and searched high and low without success.

Is this really that hard to do or even impossible in VB6?

Thanks for any help!

[IanS]

I wrote an image grabber many years ago. It had a frame and a transparent background. The idea was that you'd place the frame over something on your display, position and size the frame until you were happy and then 'click' to make a copy of whatever was in the frame.

This worked great for years on W2000 and XP but when Vista arrived it stopped working - maybe something to do with Aero.

Anyway, I think I did something like this but it probably won't work on vista/aero although I didn't bother looking for a reason - maybe I'll do it one day.

' before calling this function set your form background to vbRed and the
' call to SetLayeredWindowAttributes makes that red into transparent.


Public Function SetBackground()
Dim rtn As Long
   
   On Error GoTo errPoint
   rtn = GetWindowLong(hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE)
   rtn = rtn Or WS_EX_LAYERED
   SetWindowLong hwnd, GWL_EXSTYLE, rtn
   SetLayeredWindowAttributes hwnd, vbRed, 255, 1 ' LWA_ALPHA
   
Exit Function
errPoint:
    
    ' probably running windows9x so doesn't support the LayeredWindowAttributes
    Err.Clear

End Function