C# program in system tray

Icon: probably the most important property that represents the icon that will be shown in the system tray. Text: the text that will be shown when you hover your mouse on the icon in the system tray. Visible: indicates whether the icon is visible in the system tray. For now, we will set the icon, text and also the visibility to false since we don't want the icon to be seen right from the start of the application.

We want it to be shown only when the application is minimized. Image 02 : NotifyIcon's properties Now when the NotifyIcon control is properly set, we need to alter the application's behavior.

Minimizing To System Tray When a system tray is used, the typical behavior is that the application minimizes to the system tray instead of the Taskbar. Therefore, the form's resize event is the one we need to pay attention to. What we basically need to do is check whether the form has been minimized and if so, hide it from the Taskbar and set the NotifyIcon's visibility to True to display it in the system tray.

But how do we bring the application back to life when minimized? Simply by responding to one of the click events of the NotifyIcon control. We will choose the MouseDoubleClick event and in its response we will un-minimize the application, show it on the Taskbar once again and hide the system tray icon.

Normal; notifyIcon. When minimized, a neat icon is shown along with some information text when we hover the mouse over the icon. Image 03 : application icon show in the system tray Adding the BalloonTip Adding some handy information in the form of a balloon tip is as simple as filling in a few related properties and calling the ShowBallonTip method with the timespan in a form of milliseconds.

This specifies how long the balloon tip will be shown. As you may have guessed, the right place to call this method is the resize event. Image 04 : BalloonTip related properties notifyIcon. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I tried to minimize and hide it in the Load event, but it does nothing.

Edit : I could, as a poster suggested, modify the shortcut properties, but I'd rather use code : I don't have complete control over every computer the soft is installed on. I don't want to remove it completely from everywhere except the systray, I just want it to start minimized. This will force the form to be shown. You will need to create the form but not pass it to Application. Run :. Note that the program will now not terminate until you call Application.

It's best to do this from a handler for the FormClosed event. As a bit of a cludge, you could configure the shortcut that launches your app to "run minimised"?

That might give you what you need! Since this was tagged with vb. Create 2 classes, 1 which inherits from ApplicationContext. The other only contains a Main routine.

I've made an example that has a form and a notifyicon that when double clicked brings up the form and back again. This shows you how to control startup as minimized or normal as well as much more with NotifyIcon. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Put a program in the system tray at startup Ask Question. Asked 13 years, 2 months ago.

Active 2 years, 10 months ago. Viewed 25k times. Any ideas? It implements the IDeviceManager interface. It creates an instance of the DeviceManager class, then creates an instance of the ViewManager class passing in the DeviceManager class and hence an IDeviceManager interface. This event is fired whenever the device status changes. The IDeviceManager interface defines a simple set of commands and properties to control the simulated device:.

The above interface is implemented by the DeviceManager class. For further details of the DeviceManager class, please see the sample code. Suffice to say that it is little more than a shell simulating a real device. The ViewManager class creates and initializes a NotifyIcon instance in its constructor:. The above code installs system tray event handlers for the context menu opening, double click, and mouse up events.

It also creates instances of view models for the two views, i. If the view exists, the code simply activates it and sets the icon. Otherwise, it creates a status view, and initializes it including adding a handler for the Closing event and updating the content. Sign in Email. Forgot your password? Search within: Articles Quick Answers Messages. Tagged as C. Stats Leif Simon Goodwin Rate me:. Please Sign up or sign in to vote. Download app - The architecture is deliberately kept simple with a small number of objects and a clear separation of responsibilities: The application context object does little more than initialize the application.

The device manager object wraps the simulated device, and implements an interface allowing client objects to control the device. Separating the interface from the implementation is good design for many reasons including reducing coupling between components, making it easy to swap between implementations, and allowing clients to be tested with a dummy interface, independent of the implementation.

The view manager object which manages the user interface. It owns a NotifyIcon object, and the various menus and views. It controls the device by means of the device manager interface. About and status views implemented in WPF, using the view and view model pattern, whereby the UI is described in a XAML view, and the data displayed in the view is stored in a view model object.

In a real application, you would normally add a model to contain the source data following the MVVM pattern. Background To understand this article, you will need an understanding of. The Code The Main function first checks to see if there is already an instance of the app running, and if there is, it terminates, as only one instance may run at any one time.

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