TaskbarTools

Create an icon on the Windows taskbar and manage its menu.

Requirements

This tool requires .NET Framework 4.8, and you must add a reference to System.Drawing in your project.

Creating the taskbar icon

To create the taskbar icon, you must provide an actual icon. You can get it from various sources, for instance:

• A PNG bitmap

Bitmap ResourceBitmap = new Bitmap("MyFile.png");
IntPtr Handle = ResourceBitmap.GetHicon();
Icon TemporaryIcon = Icon.FromHandle(Handle);
Icon ResourceIcon = (Icon)TemporaryIcon.Clone();
TemporaryIcon.Dispose();

• A resource icon

// In MyFile.ico properties, choose "Embedded Resource". 
Assembly CurrentAssembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
using (Stream ResourceStream = CurrentAssembly.GetManifestResourceStream("MyNamespace.MyFile.ico"))
{
    Icon ResourceIcon = new Icon(ResourceStream);
	/* ... */
}

You can also associate a tooltip and a menu to the icon. For the tooltip, just specify your text, or null, when calling Create. To change the tooltip, call UpdateToolTipText.

The menu must be prepared before calling Create. It must be a ContextMenu, and if one of the menu items is either not visible or disabled at start, you need to call PrepareMenuItem for that item.

Finally, you need to specify the control that will receive menu commands, usually your main window.

Events

The tool supports two events:

• MenuOpening. Called before the menu is displayed.
• IconClicked. Called when the user clicks on the taskbar icon.

Methods

You can update the menu associated to the taskbar icon with these self-explanatory methods:

ToggleMenuCheck
IsMenuChecked
SetMenuCheck
SetMenuText
SetMenuIsVisible
SetMenuIsEnabled
SetMenuIcon

The last method, SetMenuIcon, can take a Bitmap or an Icon.

You can also change the taskbar icon itself with the UpdateIcon method.

Removing the taskbar icon

The icon is removed from the taskbar when you dispose of the TaskbarIcon object with a using statement.

Nullable support

To avoid declaring a nullable type, you can use the static value TaskbarIcon.Empty.

Taskbar Location

This assembly also provides additional info about the location of the taskbar and its content.

TaskbarLocation.ScreenBounds

This property gets the bounds of the current screen used to display the taskbar.

TaskbarLocation.GetRelativePosition

Point GetRelativePosition(FrameworkElement element);

Return the position a FrameworkElement should take to be on the edge of the task bar (in screen coordinates). This is useful to display popups.