GoKawiilI’m a Windows guy; I always have been. One of my first programming books was Beginning Visual C++ 6 , which crucially came with a trial version of Visual C++ that my ten-year-old self could install on my parents’ computer. I remember being on a family vacation when .NET 1.0 came out, working my way through a C# tome and gearing up to rewrite my Neopets cheating programs from MFC into Windows Forms. Even my very first job after university was at a .NET shop, although I worked mostly on the frontend.
While I followed the Windows development ecosystem from the sidelines, my professional work never involved writing native Windows apps. (Chromium is technically a native app, but is more like its own operating system.) And for my hobby projects, the web was always a better choice. But, spurred on by fond childhood memories, I thought writing a fun little Windows utility program might be a good retirement project.
Well. I am here to report that the scene is a complete mess. I totally understand why nobody writes native Windows applications these days, and instead people turn to Electron.
What I built
The utility I built, Display Blackout, scratched an itch for me: when playing games on my three-monitor setup, I wanted to black out my left and right displays. Turning them off will cause Windows to spasm for several seconds and throw all your current window positioning out of whack. But for OLED monitors, throwing up a black overlay will turn off all the pixels, which is just as good.
To be clear, this is not an original idea. I was originally using an AutoHotkey script, which upon writing this post I found out has since morphed into a full Windows application. Other | incarnations of the idea are even available on the Microsoft Store. But, I thought I could create a slightly nicer and more modern UI, and anyway, the point was to learn, not to create a commercial product.
For our purposes, what’s interesting about this app is the sort of capabilities it needs:
Enumerating the machine’s displays and their bounds
Placing borderless, titlebar-less, non-activating black windows
Intercepting a global keyboard shortcut
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