Using the NotifyIcon Class

I've used notify icons for a while, but I still think they're cool. Notify icons display icons in the Windows system tray; you can handle events like Click and DoubleClick for these icons, displaying a control panel, for example. As mentioned in the In Depth section of this chapter, this is a great feature for processes that run in the background and don't have their own windows, although they may be parts of applications that do display windows. Visual Basic .NET now lets you create Windows services, which run in the background and can display control panels (much like Microsoft SQL Server). You can use notify icons to let the user open such control panels. You can see a notify icon right next to the time of day in Figure 8.5; here's the class hierarchy of the NotifyIcon class:

Object
   MarshalByRefObject
      Component
         NotifyIcon

You can find the more notable public properties of the NotifyIcon class in Table 8.17 and the more notable events in Table 8.18.