Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Vote on this Whidbey Bug: How to create a Tray Icon (NotifyIcon) with WinForms 2.0

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Vote on this Whidbey Bug: How to create a Tray Icon (NotifyIcon) with WinForms 2.0

Posted in Programming.

While Tray Icons (and applications that use ONLY TrayIcons as their UI) are a major part of our lives, there's limited support in WinForms (2.0) for them without resorting to P/Invoke and vestigial MainForms who only call this.Hide().

NotifyIcon should be extended to support BalloonHelp. Hans Blomme's now-famous extended version of NotifyIcon is the canonical example. It still works under 2.0, but the 2.0 addition of the ContextMenuStrip makes it a little tricky. His free stuff could be integrated into the 2.0 NotifyIcon easily, adding a powerful (and missing) feature to 2.0 WinForms. Additionally, there should be a way for a Form to startup hidden to avoid the flash of the form before it calls this.Hide(), deferring to it's NotifyIcon.

Help us all out and vote to get this omission fixed in Whidbey.

UPDATE: Some Reflectoring has confirmed that has in fact been fixed in the December CTP! All is as it should be. Thanks to Chris Sells and Scott Swigart.

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Posted at 2005-01-15 08:20 PM by Scott
Comments [9]
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"Vote for Balloon Help in .NET 2.0" (One day at a time) [Trackback]

Saturday, January 15, 2005 10:24:17 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

OK, done. I noticed the following, though, on your bug report:

OS Language: Dutch

??

Phil Weber

Sunday, January 16, 2005 11:48:35 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

> While Tray Icons (and applications that use ONLY TrayIcons as their UI) are a major part of our lives

I've told you a million times to stop exaggerating.

Jeff Atwood

Sunday, January 16, 2005 3:12:30 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

So how is Raymond Chen's campaign to educate the world about the fact that THEY'RE NOT CALLED TRAY ICONS going, do you think?

:-)

Ian Griffiths

Monday, January 17, 2005 1:18:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Maybe its just too late and I'm not thinking/reading clearly (in which case I may be completely off here), but just FYI, you don't actually have to have a form run on startup in a WinForms app.

Michael Teper

Monday, January 17, 2005 8:13:09 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Interesting point, but what would start the message pump, then?

Scott Hanselman

Monday, January 17, 2005 2:42:31 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I'm been having some internal conversations w/ the Windows Forms team that indicate that this feature was added to Windows Forms in either the November or December CTP of Whidbey. Apparently, there's a ShowBalloonTip method on the NotifyIcon class. Can anyone confirm?

Chris Sells

Monday, January 17, 2005 5:18:09 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I wish I could remember the right blog (I would then point you to it) but I read recently that the pump will get started anyway, you don't need to open a form. I'm positive this came from a Microsoftie...

Michael Teper

Monday, January 17, 2005 6:55:29 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Here, I dug it up, courtesy of IanG: http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2004/11/30/nomainform.

Michael Teper

Tuesday, January 18, 2005 11:37:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

My correct email below...