UI visual help

[Techno]

Hi!

I am just in the final stages of completing my application and thought, why not make the UI more cooler?

I'm using .NET 2.0

What I want to do is this:

my application has a systray icon, so it sits in the taskbar. What I want is that when a certain event occurs, I want a small window to pop up in the task bar area and then fading away (transparency is easy)

The issue I have is that I do not know how to make a small winform "pop up" at the taskbar area, is there a way to do this?

Need an example?

in WMP 9/10 for example, when you minimize WMP to the taskbar, when it moves to the next track/playlist - a small notification window appears telling you the name of the track currently playing and so on, then it fades away after a few seconds - this is what I pretty much want.

does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

[grilkip]

jmcillhinney created something you might like, it's VB.NET though.

http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.p...ighlight=toast

[Techno]

Thanks, if there are any more then please post them!

[jmcilhinney]

That example of mine will handle popping-up and transparency. If I can remember how it works properly you should be able to change the animation method after the form has popped up so that it will fade out rather than sliding back down again. If you want other examples I've seen a few on the Web. I'd search for "toast", as that is the "cool" name for that type of window. Also, it's not difficult to achieve yourself using a Timer. You set the form's initial Location based on the WorkingArea of the PrimaryScreen, then just decement the Top property using a Timer until the whole form is showing.

[Techno]

thanks
Well currently just playing around
Made a new form
then im running that new form in a new thread to prevent the main form UI from hanging
then what I done was that in a for loop, it would sleep the thread for 100 ms for example
enable the timer to be 8 seconds, then fade it away and kill off the thread

but for some reason once its faded in (opacity = 1.0) it just disappears and trying to figure out why.

[Techno]

yeh ok i figured out why

so now im going for your idea of the timers
should work!...

[jmcilhinney]

I created the following form class in C# 2005 Express. I added a Timer in the designer and set the Interval to 15. I also set the Form's StartPosition to Manual. Note that the only real difference in C# 2003 would be that you'd use the Closing event instead of the ForClosing.

    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        private bool opened = false;
        private bool closing = false;
        private bool closed = false;

        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Rectangle workingArea = Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea;

            // Initially position the form below the system tray.
            this.Location = new Point(workingArea.Width - this.Width, workingArea.Height);
            this.timer1.Start();
        }

        private void Form1_FormClosing(object sender, FormClosingEventArgs e)
        {
            if (!this.opened || this.closing)
            {
                // Don't close the form yet.
                e.Cancel = true;
            }
            else if (!closed)
            {
                // Start fading the form out.
                this.closing = true;
                this.timer1.Interval = 30;
                this.timer1.Start();
                e.Cancel = true;
            }
        }

        private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            if (!this.opened)
            {
                // Slide the form up.
                this.Top -= 5;

                if (this.Bottom <= Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea.Height)
                {
                    // The form is fully visible.
                    this.timer1.Stop();
                    this.opened = true;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                // Fade the form out.
                this.Opacity -= .05;

                if (this.Opacity <= 0.0)
                {
                    // The form is fully faded.
                    this.timer1.Stop();
                    this.closing = false;
                    this.closed = true;
                    this.Close();
                }
            }
        }
    }