Pressing Alt-Tab twice doesn't return to my Direct3D application

Clicking alt+tab gets you out of Fullscreen. Holding alt and clicking tab, cycles through running applications. It'll bring up a bar with the application's icons on it. (You need more than one app open to cycle through them though)

It's a windows OS feature, I believe. You'd have to manually have your app catch those keys to make it do anything else, otherwise Windows will just handle it with the OS's basic key commands.

It sounds like you aren't handling lost devices properly. Take a read of:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/Lost_Devices.asp?frame=true

Quote:

Original post by S1CA It sounds like you aren't handling lost devices properly. Take a read of: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/Lost_Devices.asp?frame=true

Have read this and implemented everything like said there.
Also I have noticed such a bug in several DirectX games I have tried.

Try holding onto alt after pressing tab. The icon of the window that Windows is about to switch to will be highlighted (at least it will do the second time, when Windows has control of the screen) and its title shown. The list of tasks is ordered according to when they last had focus. Since your app was, in this example, the previous window with focus, it should appear highlighted as the second item in the list (the first being the app with current focus).

Which part of this mechanism is failing for you?

Regards
Admiral

I think I know what he means. When you alt-tab out of some full-screen applications, it works like you expect: it switches to the last window you were at before you started the app. But when you alt-tab again, the full-screen app is shifted to the 'back' of the alt-tab queue, as if it were the least recent one you were last looking at. It is a bit weird, admittedly. It's done this with World of Warcraft on my computer.

that is because alt tabbing shows the render queue of the windows. it is saying that your program will be on top of everything else that there is. whats on the bottom will be rendered under everything before it in other words. But it doesnt take into account the minimizing, so when it is minimized, it will still try to render it on top, but since there is nothing to render, you wont see it. it makes sense when you actually think about it.

2 linkofazeroth:
Yes, right. Thanks.


Now I understand how this could be solved. I have tried to remove 'Always on Top' tick from Winamp and now it works with Alt-Tab queue as expected.
Maybe we somehow need to remove "Always on Top" flag from the Direct3D application (at least for the time when we press Alt-Tab)?