Combine NotifyIcon and ToolTip

Question

I have been working with NotifyIcon in order to show an icon in the taskbar. This program has no Windows Form. I perhaps could create one and make it invisible but I was hoping to avoid it. The ToolTip functions attached to NotifyIcon are somewhat lacking, and one of the gurus here suggested I look at the ToolTip functionality. It is possible to attach ToolTip to a form. Is is possible to attach it to just the NotifyIcon? I'm trying do this:

NotifyIcon CTicon = new NotifyIcon();
ToolTip toolTip = new ToolTip();
toolTip.SetToolTip(CTicon, "Test");

And I get the error "cannot convert from 'System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon' to 'System.Windows.Forms.Control'. Is there a way to convert? I also tried:

toolTip.SetToolTip(CTicon.Container, "Test");

but a container is apparently not a valid control either. I apologize for my total lack of understanding of how this may or may not work.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

NotifyIcon is used for the system tray icon that you see on the bottom right hand corner of the screen, usage of ToolTip is only for controls such as textboxes, checkboxes and so on...for example, let's assume there's a TextBox instance called 'textBox1', on the form than this would work:

toolTip1.SetToolTip(textBox1, "Hello World");

Now, when you mouse-over the textbox, a tooltip is shown...

Answer 2

I'm not sure you can set a tooltip directly on a notify icon. It's the same thing as setting the text property on the notify icon itself. There are some limitations to the notify icon text. It's limited to 128 chars and will only stay up for a short amount of time. If you want to display more info for a longer amount of time you should look at the balloon text property of the notify icon. I highly suggest reading the MSDN page it's quite helpful.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.notifyicon.aspx

Answer 3

Tray icons don't support square tool tips, only balloons. Kinda makes sense, the icons are usually quite close together so it would be hard to see what icon produced the tip without the "stem" on the balloon. Use the NotifyIcon.BalloonTipText property.