Richard Campbell wrote:
I honestly wouldn't take this approach. While microsoft may do this, you can use a different approach without sacrificing compatibility (well, except for maybe anything from stardock.) Microsoft's approach is kind of hackish/kludgy, and even worse, it's slow.
A better approach would be a plugin system. User32/gdi32/win32k would pass off rendering calls to a plugin, which would be responsible for the actual drawing. That way you could completely change HOW things are drawn, for instance, you can create an opengl accelerated windowing system, etc. Hmm...maybe i could write a draft for such a system....now i'm wanting to code, hehe. Granted, this would probably be better off as a fork or 3rd party project...but still...
Full ACK. When I first saw the 'super duper new luna GUI' I was disappointed what MS did. It is hackish or set on top. I thought, when they are MS and do have access to the src, why don't they realize some kind of plugin system or do the theming in win32k.sys. So this is one point, where we can do better than the original. (while theming is one of the latter things we need)
BTW. there are manny more things we could do different and better than MS. I often ask wether the setup2 must be so simmilar to that of w2k or welcome.exe. It is really a copy. So far.