I haven''t got any directX experience at this point. I am investigating if it is of interest for me to use directX for creating nice screen that have interaction and run with effects etc... As development environment i will use Dot Net. 1 first i need to know if it is possible to let''s say run the left part of the screen in directX mode and the right part show an internet explorer window(embed a explorer ocx). In general is it possible to show a already build usercontrol onto the directX environment. I have started some example directX program and see that it takes over my screen completely. 2 What i need to do is show text, video''s,images, music, web pages and other things. They can be positioned over each other (text on top of a video) with some transparency. When running text can change and stuff like that... Transparency is one of the mean things we need at this time besides the possibilities to show usercontrols from third parties. Is there someone in the world of Direct X who can help me decide om this topic. Thanks, Willie.

1) Yes, it's possible. The key is to call the DirectX GetDC (or something similar) function to get a handle to the window for GDI functions. The alternative is to run DX in windowed mode and use two windows.

2) Yes, you can display all of the mentioned with transparency included (In many cases) you'll just have to write the code to implement it. You may look into using Direct3D (DX 8), as you can emulate 2D and have hardware-accelerated transparency. Further, using DX 7 (and maybe 8) you can get a pointer to the actual display memory for the user's desktop and draw over it (text, videos, etc.) if you wish to go the windowed route. Also, many multimedia display functions are in the DirectShow libraries, such as playing videos and other multimedia graphics. You may want to look into these.

Danny

Edited by - mnansgar on January 21, 2002 10:05:09 PM

>The alternative is to run DX in windowed mode and use two >windows.

When using windows mode must i use a window special for DX or is it possible to put on the DX window a control on a specific location?
Let''s say i have a DX window that covers the whole screen and on top is a control from a third party such as flash.