Put your app in the tray or pin to task bar

[szlamany]

How do you go about putting your app in the system tray or pinning to the task bar (as in Windows 7)?

How do you become part of the right-click menu on the desktop or files - like you see various zip archive tools?

[jmcilhinney]

Making your app appear in the system tray is a matter of adding a NotifyIcon component to your form, setting its Icon property and making it Visible. You can handle the Click and/or DoubleClick events of the icon as well as set its ContextMenuStrip, just like a control.

Pinning a shortcut to the Task Bar is not something I've ever don in code but it's obviously a Windows 7-specific feature. As such, I would imagine that you'd use the Windows 7 API Code Pack.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/WindowsAPICodePack

That said, I didn't see mention of pinning when I glanced at that page. I've often wondered whether pinning to the Task Bar in Windows 7 uses the same underlying mechanism as the Quick Lauch tool bar in previous versions. That might be something to investigate.

Adding your app to the Windows Explorer right-click menu is another thing I've never done. I believe it's something that's controlled by the Registry though.

http://scottiestech.info/2009/11/15/...-context-menu/

[szlamany]

Thank you for the links.

[szlamany]

Pinning a shortcut to the Task Bar is not something I've ever don in code but it's obviously a Windows 7-specific feature. As such, I would imagine that you'd use the Windows 7 API Code Pack.

I'm curious - if you use the win 7 api code pack do you have to have releases of the .exe that do and do not contain that code? Or do you detect the o/s you are on to have it handle this...

[jmcilhinney]

I'm curious - if you use the win 7 api code pack do you have to have releases of the .exe that do and do not contain that code? Or do you detect the o/s you are on to have it handle this...

That's up to you. There are various applications around that say that they support specific operating systems. I'd think that putting all the functionality into a single version would be preferable, but if the differences are too pronounced then it may be messy to keep checking the OS version all the time. Even if you do have different versions for different OSes, you could still have a single set of source code. You could add conditional compilation blocks and then create multiple build configurations with different compilation constants.