Adding a 'Minimize to tray'-button to a Form's caption bar

Introduction

This short article shows you how to easily implement a 'Minimize to Tray' button to the caption bar of the form. The code that comes with this article only supports default forms and it doesn't support Visual Styles. Feel free to improve the code and to contact me if you need any help with it. It would be great if you send me a copy when you fix these previously mentioned limitations so that I can update this article.

Background

The current program I am working on needs to run in the background. So the best way to do this is to minimize that app to the tray bar where it is less annoying than in the task bar. So I added some code which causes the program to minimize when the user wants to close it via the Close button in the caption bar. It worked and for a time it was good. But it was a bad, not user-friendly way of doing it. I wanted to have a 'Minimize to Tray' button like eMule has - after doing some research, I noticed that this has not been done before in C#.

Using the code

Step 1: Add the file 'MinTrayBtn.cs' to your project, and add the NotifyIcon component with your IDE's designer. Set an icon for the NotifyIcon component and set the visibility to false.

Step 2: Now simply declare a MinTrayBtn variable in your Windows Form class to instantiate the object in the Form constructor.

public class WinForm : System.Windows.Forms.Form {

    //... Some other code
    TyronM.MinTrayBtn mybutton;
    //... Some other code

    public WinForm() {
        mybutton = new TyronM.MinTrayBtn(this);
    }

}

Step 3: Add a function to catch the MinTrayBtnClicked event and register the event handler. Use the Click-event of the NotifyIcon, then show the Form again.

public class WinForm : System.Windows.Forms.Form {
    
    //... Some other code
    TyronM.MinTrayBtn mybutton;
    //... Some other code

    public WinForm() {
        mybutton = new TyronM.MinTrayBtn(this);
        mybutton.MinTrayBtnClicked += 
          new TyronM.MinTrayBtnClickedEventHandler(TrayBtn_clicked);
    }
    
    private void TrayBtn_clicked(object sender, EventArgs e) {
        this.Hide();
        this.notifyIcon1.Visible = true;
    }


    private void notifyIcon1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e) {
        this.Show();
        this.notifyIcon1.Visible = false;
    }
    
}

Points of Interest

The caption bar is part of the non-client area of the window which is handled by Windows, so it isn't easy to add a button there. I had to draw the button by myself and capture various mouse events to clone the behaviour of the other buttons (this button behaves exactly like the others do, or at least it should do :)

Revision

0.8.5
11 Jul 2005
- Changed: Variable caption button size (adjusts itself to the system metrics).
- Fixed: Drawing issues on changes of the window width.
0.8
20 Apr 2005
- Article creation.

License

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