How can I style the border and title bar of a window in WPF

Question

We are developing a WPF application which uses Telerik s suite of controls and everything works and looks fine  Unfortunately  we recently needed to replace the base class of all our dialogs  changing  RadWindow by the standard WPF window  reason is irrelevant to this discussion   In doing so  we ended up having an application which still looked pretty on all developer s computers  Windows 7 with Aero enabled  but was ugly when used in our client s environment  Terminal Services under Windows Server 2008 R2    Telerik s RadWindow is a standard user control that mimicks a dialog s behaviour so styling it was not an issue  With WPF s Window though  I have a hard time changing its  border   What I mean by  border  here is both the title bar with the icon and the 3 standard buttons  Minimize  Maximize Restore  Close  and the resize grip around the window   How can I change the looks of these items    Title bar color 3 standard buttons Window s real border color   With round corners if possible

User · Accepted Answer

Those are  non-client  areas and are controlled by Windows  Here is the MSDN docs on the subject  the pertinent info is at the top    Basically  you set your Window s WindowStyle  None   then build your own window interface   similar question on SO

User · Answer

I found a more straight forward solution from  DK comment in this question  the solution is written by Alex and described here with source  To make customized window    download the sample project here  edit the generic xaml file to customize the layout  enjoy

User · Answer

You need to set   WindowStyle  None   AllowsTransparency  True  and optionally ResizeMode  NoResize  and then set the Style property of the window to your custom window style  where you design the appearance of the window  title bar  buttons  border  to anything you want and display the window contents in a ContentPresenter    This seems to be a good article on how you can achieve this  but there are many other articles on the internet

User · Answer

If someone says you can t because only Windows can control the non-client area  they re wrong     That s just a half-truth because Windows lets you specify the dimensions of the non-client area  The fact is  this is possible only throughout the Windows  kernel methods  and you re in  NET  not C C    Anyway  don t worry  P Invoke was meant just for such things  Indeed  the whole of the Windows Form UI and Console application Std-I O methods are offered using system calls  Hence  you d have only to perform the right system calls to set the non-client area up  as documented in MSDN     However  this is a really hard solution I came up with a lot of time ago  Luckily  as of  NET 4 5  you can use the WindowChrome class to adjust the non-client area like you want  Here you can get to start with   In order to make things simpler and cleaner  I ll redirect you here  a guide to change the window border dimensions to whatever you want  By setting it to 0  you ll be able to implement your custom window border in place of the system s one   I m sorry for not posting a clear example  but later I will for sure

User · Answer

I suggest you to start from an existing solution and customize it to fit your needs  that s better than starting from scratch   I was looking for the same thing and I fall on this open source solution  I hope it will help

[wpf] How can I style the border and title bar of a window in WPF?

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