Creating a custom shaped window

A typical window has several aspects that are not directly controllable by a WPF application, such as the look of the title bar, minimize, maximize, and close buttons; its shape is always rectangular, and so on. These settings (called the non-client area of the window) are defined by the current Windows theme selected by the user using the Control Panel, with some customization possible for font sizes, colors, caption color, and so on, but the basic appearance characteristics of the window remain.

An application may want to customize the way a window looks from the outside. Canonical examples of this are media players. The built-in Windows Media Player, for instance, can be switched to skin mode where its shape becomes something that is far from rectangular (this particular skin was downloaded from Microsoft's website; in Windows Media Player, open the View | Skin chooser menu and click More Skins):

Let's see how we can create a custom shaped window with WPF...