A few days ago, I ran into a situation where I wanted to quickly check something on my desktop without minimizing all my open windows. I wondered whether Windows 11 offered a built-in way to make windows transparent, but it doesn't.

I found a few third-party closed-source tools that could do this, so I decided to write my own. Over the course of a few days, I built a WinForms-based C# app called havTransparentWnd that allows you to make windows transparent.

The app lets you adjust the opacity of transparent windows, block specific applications from being made transparent, and provides system tray integration for easy access. It also supports a global hotkey to toggle transparency on and off, as well as multiple languages (currently English and German).

You can download havTransparentWnd from the Downloads section. It requires Windows 10 or later and the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime. The source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license. As usual, there's also a screenshot on the Projects page.