How to opt out Task Bar Button & Display System Tray Icon

Question

How can I hide my VC# applications task bar button and show a system tray icon instead. Then, when I have the icon, how to display notifications like FDM or Windows Update etc, and add right click menu to the icon.

Answer 1

The NotifyIcon class creates an icon in the system tray. As that page indicates, you can create a ContextMenu, which will appear when the user right clicks.

NotifyIcon includes "BalloonTip" properties that can be used to display the messages you're referring to. This example is from the MSDN documentation.

notifyIcon1.Icon = Icon.ExtractAssociatedIcon(Application.ExecutablePath);
notifyIcon1.Visible = true;
notifyIcon1.BalloonTipIcon = ToolTipIcon.Error;
notifyIcon1.BalloonTipTitle = "Delayed Write Failed";
notifyIcon1.BalloonTipText = "Some of your data has been lost.";
notifyIcon1.ShowBalloonTip(0);

As @Kobi says, you also want to set your form's ShowInTaskbar property to false.

Answer 2

1. On your form set ShowInTaskbar to false.
2. Use a control called NotifyIcon to add icons to the system tray. It also has an handy ShowBalloonTip method.