How to make 'always-on-bottom'-window
Warning It was suggested that you can accomplish this by calling SetParent and setting the window to be a child of the Desktop. If you do this, you cause the Win32 Window Manager to combine the input queue of the Desktop to your child window, this is a bad thing - Raymond Chen explains why.
Also, keep in mind that calling SetWindowPos with HWND_BOTTOM is incomplete. You need to do this whenever your window is changing zorder. Handle the WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING event, look at SWP_NOZORDER for more info.
SetWindowPos can make windows AlwaysOnTop. Most likely it can give the opposite result. Try something along these lines:
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
static extern bool SetWindowPos(IntPtr hWnd, IntPtr hWndInsertAfter, int X,
int Y, int cx, int cy, uint uFlags);
public const uint SWP_NOSIZE = 0x0001;
public const uint SWP_NOMOVE = 0x0002;
public const uint SWP_NOACTIVATE = 0x0010;
public const int HWND_BOTTOM = 1;
SetWindowPos(hWnd, HWND_BOTTOM, 0, 0, 0, 0, SWP_NOSIZE | SWP_NOMOVE | SWP_NOACTIVATE);
Note:
- Haven't tested this approach (for making windows always on bottom)
- If it happens to work, then most likely the show desktop operation will hide the window. So maybe you should go even deeper into this 'nice' API.
EDIT: Done some searching along these lines to confirm whether it will do the trick and found something interesting - a duplicate.