Microsoft recently announced in their ridiculously wordy way that Windows Aero is dead. I really liked Aero and have a bit of a history with it. Window Clippings, the screen capture tool I originally created, was to the best of my knowledge the first to be able to perfectly capture the effect in a 32-bit alpha-blended image. I wrote extensively about the Desktop Window Manager that gave life to the translucent glass (this, this and this comes to mind).
Few apps that I know of ever took advantage of it, the most obvious examples being Internet Explorer 9 and Office 2010. There was the odd contribution from third parties, such as Google’s cute Chrome browser. Ironically, as I write this Chrome is on version 19 (nineteen!?) and they have still not been able to fix a glaring bug in their “chrome”. I must be the only one who notices such things.
I understand that Aero is not particularly power efficient compared to the new Metro UI and I get that it was not particularly easy to use unless your app was entirely written in Direct2D or Direct3D. Still it is sad to see it go. So long old friend.
To use the binaries you’ll need an open-source wrapper too. The most convenient way to get these is via NuGet. Just do a search for SQLite and install sqlite-net. This NuGet package contains a couple of helper classes and attributes to create and access the database.
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