I was wondering how to change or modify the transparency of a Panel in C#, not the whole form, but the panel only.. I've seen many C# tutorials on Opacity, but its for the Form. im looking for how it could be possible with the Panel only. Thank You!
Yes, opacity can only work on top-level windows. It uses a hardware feature of the video adapter, that doesn't support child windows, like Panel. The only top-level Control derived class in Winforms is Form.
Several of the 'pure' Winform controls, the ones that do their own painting instead of letting a native Windows control do the job, do however support a transparent BackColor. Panel is one of them. It uses a trick, it asks the Parent to draw itself to produce the background pixels. One side-effect of this trick is that overlapping controls doesn't work, you only see the parent pixels, not the overlapped controls.
This sample form shows it at work:
public partial class Form1 : Form {
public Form1() {
InitializeComponent();
this.BackColor = Color.White;
panel1.BackColor = Color.FromArgb(25, Color.Black);
}
protected override void OnPaint(PaintEventArgs e) {
e.Graphics.DrawLine(Pens.Yellow, 0, 0, 100, 100);
}
}
If that's not good enough then you need to consider stacking forms on top of each other. Like this.
Notable perhaps is that this restriction is lifted in Windows 8. It no longer uses the video adapter overlay feature and DWM (aka Aero) cannot be turned off anymore. Which makes opacity/transparency on child windows easy to implement. Relying on this is of course future-music for a while to come. Windows 7 will be the next XP :)