The Windows wait cursor, informally the Blue circle of death (known as the hourglass cursor until
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
) is a cursor that indicates that an application is busy performing an operation. It can be accompanied by an arrow if the operation is being performed in the background.
The wait cursor can display on programs using the
Windows API
The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. The name Windows API collectively refers to several different platform implementations ...
.
History
From the first version of Windows to
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...
, it was represented by an hourglass.
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
introduced a new, animated wait cursor. The wait cursor in
Windows 7
Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearl ...
was almost identical.
It is possible, however, to change the appearance of the cursor into the original hourglass cursor.
Windows 8
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...
introduced a new flat wait cursor. The new cursor is light blue on dark blue and removes the fade and the particles from the animated part.
Usage
There are two uses for the wait cursor: short term and long term. The wait cursor is a shared resource in the system across applications and windows. By default, when the mouse cursor is in a window, the cursor shown is controlled by the window's registered window class and handling of
WM_SETCURSOR. Different scenarios can be used instead.
In
Microsoft Foundation Class Library
Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC) is a C++ object-oriented library for developing desktop applications for Windows.
MFC was introduced by Microsoft in 1992 and quickly gained widespread use. While Microsoft has introduced alternative ap ...
(MFC) the wait cursor can be controlled by
CWaitCursor. If a local instance is created, the wait cursor is reset when the instance goes out of scope. It is used primarily for short term wait cursors.
In
Windows Forms
Windows Forms (WinForms) is a free and open-source graphical (GUI) class library included as a part of Microsoft .NET, .NET Framework or Mono Framework, providing a platform to write client applications for desktop, laptop, and tablet PCs. Wh ...
, each Control instance has a Cursor property, which can be controlled by the application itself.
Control.Cursor is the cursor shown when the mouse is in the control's region;
System.Windows.Forms.Cursor.Current is the cursor shown when the mouse enters any window of the application.
For long term wait cursors, the
UseWaitCursor property can be set (either Control level or application level) on one occasion and reset at another time.
References
{{Error messages
Windows components