shell32 – Quppa.net

View source on GitHub.

In the previous post in this series, I showed how to find the location of a notify icon by implementing the new Windows 7 Shell32.dll function Shell_NotifyIconGetRect in managed code for use with the System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon class.

In this post, I will look at how to accurately position a window above (or adjacent to) a notify icon, no matter the location of the taskbar (barring a certain issue that I note at the end of this post :)). As I noted in Part 2, the current version of Keiki is hardcoded to appear in the bottom right-hand corner of the user’s screen, making it very out of place when the taskbar is moved to the top/right/left of the screen. We’ll need to delve into the Win32 API once again, but as in Part 2 the amount of code required is not daunting, even for a Win32 beginner like me.

Continue reading “Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 3 (Taskbar Position)”

View source on GitHub.

You may have noticed that the notification area applications in Windows 7 (Volume/Power/Network/Action Centre) appear centred above their icon. I wanted Keiki to do the same; the current version is hardcoded to sit in the bottom right of the screen, which causes a few problems:

The taskbar position is not taken into account; the window will be in the bottom right even if the taskbar is at the top of the screen.
The window appears on top of the new Windows 7 fly-out interface for hiding notify icons if the Keiki icon is kept there.

In this post, I will demonstrate how to retrieve the location of a System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon with a function new to shell32.dll in Windows 7: Shell_NotifyIconGetRect. Windows Vista unfortunately lacks this function: I will cover the approach I use in Vista in a later post.

Thanks to Frédéric Hamidi for pointing me in the right direction.

Continue reading “Windows 7-style Notification Area Applications in WPF: Part 2 (Notify Icon Position)”