Adding Application Icons to the Task Bar
By Dino Esposito, September 01, 2003
Since Windows 95, handling icons in the tray area has been controlled by the Shell_NotifyIcon function in the Win32 API. The .NET Framework wraps this API into an invisible control named NotifyIcon. Dino takes a look at the programming interface and demonstrates a sample tray application.
Adding Application Icons to the TaskBar
Listing 2 Pseudocode for handling a right-click mouse event to display the context menu
private void ShowContextMenu()
{
// Win32 is an arbitrary namespace representing the class
// you use to import the Win32 API functions and structures
// used in the pseudo-code.
// POINT is the Win32 POINT structure imported
POINT pt;
if (ContextMenu != null)
{
pt = new POINT();
Win32.GetCursorPos(pt);
// this.window.Handle is a private member not callable from outside the
// NotifyIcon class!
Win32.SetForegroundWindow(this.window.Handle);
// Raise the Popup event on the ContextMenu class
ContextMenu.OnPopup(EventArgs.Empty);
// Display the menu
Win32.TrackPopupMenuEx(ContextMenu.Handle, TPM_LEFTALIGN,
pt.x, pt.y, this.window.Handle, null);
// Force a task switch to the application that called TrackPopupMenuEx
// (this appliaction). This can be accomplished by posting a
// dummy message to the window or thread. (See KB 135788)
Win32.PostMessage(this.window.Handle, WM_NULL, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero);
}
}
