Windowless shape drawing

US8212818B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• Microsoft Corporation · US

Inventors

• John W. Hart, II · Bellevue, US
• John Z. Chen · Woodinville, US
• Taosheng Hu · Shanghai, CN
• Scott Tucker · Kirkland, US
• Wenhui Zhu · Shanghai, CN
• Chen Ji · New York, US
• Steven Michael Hoag · Snohomish, US
• Paul Yuknewicz · Redmond, US

Key dates

• Filing date: Aug 8, 2008
• Grant date: Jul 3, 2012
• Expiry date: Aug 4, 2030

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G06T11/203
• WIPO field: Computer technology
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

Development environments are commonly used to facilitate the development of user interfaces (e.g. windows forms, web forms, etc.). Drawing objects are components that may be used within the development environment to provide visual enhancements to the user interface. An effective method for drawing one or more drawing objects is disclosed herein to draw the drawing objects as windowless shapes within a shape container. The shape container may be configured to participate in a windows message loop (e.g. event handling system), wherein the windowless shapes do not participate in the windows message loop (e.g. lack a windows handle). The shape container listens, for example, within the windows message loop for operations pertaining to windowless shapes, and executes the operations upon the windowless shapes. Computer resources may be efficiently allocated, for example to the graphical user interface during runtime, instead of the windowless shapes consuming resources to participate in the windows message loop.