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What is the Desktop Windows Manager (DWM)?
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
One of Windows Vista’s most touted features is its new Aero (formerly Aero Glass) graphical 
scheme, which gives transparent, frosted edges to screen windows, taskbar thumbnails, and task-switch thumbnails. (Aero also enables the new Flip 3D task switcher.) But how do these features actually work? The new DWM runs as a service: The Desktop Windows Manager Session Service, with an internal name of UxSMS ("ux" stands for "user experience"), is implemented in the dwm.exe image.
This service is responsible for compositing the desktop display for the entire OS when you run the Aero scheme. In all previous OSs (and in Vista when you aren’t running Aero), each application writes directly to the screen buffer. In the event that a window passes over the graphical area of another window, the system sends a WM_PAINT message to the application, telling it to redraw its window. What is the Desktop Windows Manager (DWM)?
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