Creating a Transparent Form

To create a transparent splashscreen, like for example the splash displayed when adobe acrobat reader starts, do the following:

1. Create the a new form
2. Set the Border Style to bsNone
3. Set the Position to poScreenCenter
4. Overide the create constuctor and add the line Brush.Style = bsClear
5. Override the createparams method and add the line
   Params.ExStyle := Params.ExStyle + WS_EX_TRANSPARENT +WS_EX_TOPMOST;
   after the call to inherited
6. Add an image componet to the form and load your transparent image into it. I use PNG's rather than bitmaps with a transparent color.  PNGImage (a PNG wrapper for TPicture is available at sourceforge).
7. Set the image and form's Autosize to true.
8. Slap on a timer to close the form after a couple of seconds.