bigmuscle

So it's confirmed that 8.1 removes them? I cannot confirm officially, I just tried with older leaked build 9385 and pixel shaders needed for blur effect don't exist there. Also some objects such as input layouts etc. are not created in memory. But this is not big problems, shaders are small programs only (20 lines of code) so it is very easy to reimplement them. Also, public symbols for that build were not available so I'm not sure what's all missing - I just know that function needed for drawing occluded regions is still there. And whole desktop rendering was moved from DX 10.1 to DX11 completely.

Yeah, it's funny that Theme service is nothing more than DLL injection and system functions hook :-) I say also one more thing. Current Aero Glass requires to be injected on before DWM completely loads because it reuses many DWM objects (pixel shaders, input layouts etc.). The situation turns out with Windows 8.1, because there are no such objects thus I must create all the Direct3D objects on my own.

Nice tutorial about DLL injection with CreateRemoteThread can be found here http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/using-createremotethread-for-dll-injection-on-windows/ . It is nothing complicated, you just need to have admin privileges to be able to inject into dwm process on Win8 else you will get "Access denied" error. And if I remember correctly, your application need to have SE_DEBUG_NAME privilege too. I also forgot to mention one more point - when dwm process is restarted for whatever reason, you must ensure that the DLL will be reinjected. Actually, "AppInit_DLLs" can be nicely replaced with RegisterUserApiHook function which does not depend on secure boot. You just need to run system service which ensures that this function is called before winlogon.exe loads. You use it to hook certain system function and user32.dll will then load your DLL into every process (exactly as AppInit_DLLs does). The only problem is that this function can be called only once for whole session and it is already in use by Theme service. Thus you must handle it properly.

How did your "DLL2DWMInjector.exe" from v.0.6 work? It did just the thing. It DID work with Secure Boot ON. Both that AND it did NOT alert the Antivirus software. Sounds strange given what it did, but it did work. It worked in a very easy way. It just restarted dwm.exe and then called CreateRemoteThread which injected DLL into dwm process. But: a) you need to have admin privileges to do it B) since dwm is restarted, your screen will go blank for a while c) sometimes, dwm restart causes user to log off d) it is a total race because you must manage to inject DLL before certain point so the result completely depends on many things and mainly on your luck --- if DLL is loaded before point A, then everything will work correctly --- if DLL is loaded after point A, you will get nothing --- if you hit the wrong moment when DWM process holds some lock for a critical section, you will end up in a deadlock and you must restart your computer

Sure, but I'm actually more concerned about having to disable "Secure Boot" in BIOS\UEFI (since it happened to be the real cause of the problem). No problem for me, but I'll understand if a lot of people will be scared away by this. Anything regarding "bios" and "safety" in the context of "disable" is a spooky lot for many, can't blame 'em. You cannot do anything about this. It is how Aero Glass works by design and it will not probably change. If anyone intends to use any kind of application, he should ensure that any other software (e.g. antivirus) does not prevent him from using it. Nothing to be done with it - there is million possibilites and million one probabilities that some application will block any of the possibilities and it is impossible to catch all of them. And about secure boot...yes, it is sad but we must live with that - it is how Win8 works - secure boot on = no DLL injections. Of course, if you know about any better way then you can let us know ;-)

odysseyofnoises: if you look at your picture properly then you can notice that active window and taskbar are not completely solid all. They are nicely transparent just with high level of the opacity. You change the opacity in Colors control panel.

The reality is that even WindowBlinds use DLL injection. Also my opinion us that LoadAppInit_DLLs is one of the most secure injection because you can check what is really injected. There are much "worse" ways which you cannot control at all. MagicAndre1981: I guess you use shader optimization, it's probably not compatible in this setup.

This is not on me - this has nothing to do with DWM. Glass is present on all places where each application (Windows Explorer in this case) requests it.

DosProbie: nice screenshots, I should make some gallery on the website to present the look of AG's users. Tusticles: yeah, WB does not provide blur effect but even if it does in the future, it still follows different approach than my Aero Glass. WB just hooks into system via RegisterUserApiHook and thus completely replaces UX theme service. Then it draws the frame completely via GDI so you cannot be sure that HW acceleration is used for it. My first (private only) version of Aero Glass worked this way, because it is very easy to do, but I rather decided go the native way by DWM hooking :-)

Yeah, these two looks clean. Could you just modify the second one so the blur is more noticeable? E.g. by adding some background inactive window with text etc? And is it simple custom resource change? I don't want to present "Use unsigned themes" feature now because it is still buggy and I will not fix it in final release, thus screenshot must show only what we are able to achieve by changing "CustomThemeResource" registry value.

I would like to used that screen shot to present one of the Aero Glass features as "hey, look how you can completely change border skin without touching Windows theme". drakenabarion's screenshots look nice but they are too Win8-similar to present "theme resource change" feature and I guess CKyHC's screenshot is completely changed Windows theme. Anyway, the website is being built here http://glass8.berlios.de/

If anyone has any nice clean screenshot of Windows 8 showing Aero Glass in action with custom resource applied, could you share it please? (the more different from default theme the better)

Is it because of UxStyle? I prevously never had this error when I installed it with RC3. Nope, it has nothing to do with ux* something, msstyles theme, bypassing verification etc. It is just because you have set invalid path to your custom theme resource.

No, it is not possible to disable it. Also message "Failed to load custom theme file" has nothing to do with this bypassing of theme signature verification. It means that it failed to load custom theme resource which you have specified manually in the registry.

It does not happen here. Also as I mentioned above, the failure is not actually dependent on currently selected theme but on the theme stored in HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT registry key. And I have not found when the value is updated there. Maybe the workaround would be changing the permission of this key so nobody can change theme in there. I remember similar behaviour for all system files in older Windows versions - when you deleted or patched some system file, it was automatically restored to the original version in a while. It seems that it does not happen anymore. But basic theme is used only when desktop composition is not loaded which is very hard to do in Win8.

Rayn19: it is normal behaviour - custom theme fails to load when you don't bypass theme signature verification. nothing to do. Also other solution such as uxtheme patch or uxstyle has completely same problem - when you apply custom theme and then disable the software (or just windows update break something), DWM will fail. On the other side, no need to refresh the OS. It is enough to boot into recovery console, run regedit, connect your registry and change the theme manually back.

In such case, post your debug.log (unless you've already post it and I overlooked it) and possibly minidump.dmp (for RC3 only). Maybe something causes crash or deadlock in your DWM.

Actually, this seems to be the real reason of my black screens. However, it is more complicated because I was using signed theme when it happened. I noticed that theme in HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\etc. key is loaded before login screen and this theme does not always correspond the user's current theme. And when the black screen appeared, it was really set to the unsigned theme resulting in DWM failed to load. So questions are: when the theme into default user registry branch is set? And why Windows automatic repair is not able to fix this problem?

Do you use custom theme or something? Are you sure that it is Aero Glass related? I must say one thing - it happened again to me now. Same scenario - restored from sleep and after some time I got "Not enough memory" error which was followed by black screen after a while. I restarted and ended up with black screen. But again, Aero Glass was not active at all. Just was using MS-signed Win8 RP theme.

I did but I won't publish it now - just a default Aero theme with glow everywhere a bit darker shadow on active windows and less transparent inactive windows to make it look more like it looked in Direct2D mode. I didn't still decide whether to modify default Aero theme only or use something different e.g. RP based etc.

NoelC: my Windows 8 installation for Aero Glass experiments are running under VMWare where only a minimum amount of utilities is installed else the system is completely clean. It was interesting that problem appeared always in the same situation - I didn't shutdown but only put a system into a sleep. After a day I resumed from sleep, everything was working correctly until I needed to restart. The scenario was always the same... And about the glow effect. Although all windows glow effect is just a stretched texture (stored in the theme atlas), the shell windows generate the effect on-the-fly. Thus there is no resource for this and you must directly edit glow constants in msstyle file. Check this http://vistastylebuilder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1932.msg10940#msg10940

Yeah, I tried analyzed the source and there seems to be no other reason for this. My guess was that some file specified in *.theme file is missing but I was not able to reproduce it. But the thing with the screen saver is the good explanation. And as someone already mentioned here, the theming thing and any other feature added in RCx versions will be made as optional and disabled by default in 1.0. Just because the current branch is feature-complete and I don't want any new feature to break anything. And one more thing on my mind. Maybe someone has the same experience - in the last month I had to reinstall my Win8 twice just due to the black screen on startup and CTRL key didn't help (and neither system restore helped). But the important thing is that Aero Glass was not active at this time at all, so it seems that some Windows update was the cause.

Is it possible to check which process this dialog belongs to?

I'm not even sure where this message box comes from. When does it appear? Only when changing theme, or randomly during a day?

If you have any non-working application (e.g. WinDBG etc.), could you provide exact step how to reproduce it after clean installation of that application? I will try to install it to see what's wrong. But currently I don't see any reason why changes in DWM should influence any application. And please, verify that it does not happen when DWMGlass.dll is not loaded. Btw, don't rely on custom themes much now, it has not been properly tested and I don't intend to modify it more before 1.0 release. For example, I don't know what happens when something in uxinit.dll is changed to break this function, i.e. control panel loads theme correctly but verifying on Windows startup fails - will it automatically switch to default Windows theme or what?