In Part 2 of this series I demonstrated how to use the Shell_NotifyIconGetRect function to find the position of a notify icon. This function is new to Windows 7, however, and we must find a different solution for earlier versions of Windows.
This turns out to be quite difficult. A post on the MSDN forums by user parisisinjail provided a good starting point, and it led me to a Code Project article by Irek Zielinski that explained exactly what to do – in native code. This post shows how to implement this kind of approach in managed code.
I have verified that the following code works with Windows XP and Vista. It also works under Windows 7, but only when the icon is not located in the notification area fly-out (not found in previous versions). As such, this solution should only be used when Shell_NotifyIconGetRect is not available.
The basic idea is that the notification area is actually just a special Toolbar control, with each icon being a toolbar button. We want to find the toolbar control and loop over the buttons until we find the one that corresponds to our notify icon. We can then find the coordinates of the toolbar button. (The fly-out in Windows 7 has a separate toolbar control, so you could search that instead of using Shell_NotifyIconGetRect if you really wanted to.)
The process sounds straight forward, but the implementation is quite tricky. Read on for the code.