Formless Tray Application

[jmcilhinney]

C# version here.

Recently, I replied to a thread on another forum where the poster asked how to create an application that displayed an icon in the notification area (aka system tray) but didn't require a form to be created and hidden. My first thought was that a form was required but, upon reflection, I thought that there must be another way. I recalled having read something about the ApplicationContext class so I investigated that further and that is indeed the way to do it.

Generally, whether you create your own Main method or you use the VB application framework (which hides the main method from you, but it's there) you call Application.Run and pass a form as an argument, which becomes the application's main form. You can also pass an object whose type inherits ApplicationContext as an argument to Application.Run. The application will then close when you call Application.Exit or Application.ExitThread.

The example attached below meets the requirements of the poster of the aforementioned thread. They wanted a NotifyIcon and the ability to use an OpenFileDialog. For that, I created a component that provided a designer, which made it easy to configure the NotifyIcon and the ContextMenuStrip. My derived ApplicationContext then creates an instance of that component and duly disposes it when the ApplicationContext itself is disposed.

Simply run the app and you will see the NotifyIcon. Right-click the icon to get a menu that provides items to display an OpenFileDialog and to exit the app.

Finally, note that the attached application was written in VB 2010, so you will need VS 2010 or VB Express 2010 or later to open it.

EDIT:

I have added a version of the demo that uses the RegisterHotKey API.