Tutorial - Creating System Tray Icon and Context Menus Using VB.NET


Power of Software

Visual Basic.NET by Nitin Chopra

System Tray Icon
and Context Menus

Public Events

Click	Occurs when the user clicks the icon in the status area.
Disposed (inherited from Component)	Adds an event handler to listen to the Disposed event on the component.
DoubleClick	Occurs when the user double-clicks the icon in the status notification area of the taskbar.
MouseDown	Occurs when the user presses the mouse button while the pointer is over the icon in the status notification area of the taskbar.
MouseMove	Occurs when the user moves the mouse while the pointer is over the icon in the status notification area of the taskbar.
MouseUp	Occurs when the user releases the mouse button while the pointer is over the icon in the status notification area of the taskbar.

Protected Properties

DesignMode (inherited from Component)	Gets a value that indicates whether the Component is currently in design mode.
Events (inherited from Component)	Gets the list of event handlers that are attached to this Component.

Protected Methods

Dispose	Overloaded. Overridden. See Component.Dispose.
Finalize (inherited from Component)	Overridden. Releases unmanaged resources and performs other cleanup operations before the Component is reclaimed by garbage collection. In C# and C++, finalizers are expressed using destructor syntax.
GetService (inherited from Component)	Returns an object that represents a service provided by the Component or by its Container.
MemberwiseClone (inherited from Object)	Creates a shallow copy of the current Object.

Ok, enough of text, lets come to the point. If you look at the public properties of the NotifyIcon class you roughly get an idea how everything is going to be done. The Icon property defines the icon that appears in the status area. The Pop-up menus for an icon are addressed with the ContextMenu property. The Text property assigns ToolTip text to the icon. In order for the icon to show up in the status area, the Visible property must be set to true.

In VB 6.0 you needed to add a picture box to the form and hook it using Shell_NotifyIcon() windows API function. Here the picture box acted as a container. In .NET we don’t need to do this. As you can see we already have a public member Container which does this job.

Note: To be a container, the class must implement the IContainer interface, which supports methods for adding, removing, and retrieving components.

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