Welcome to my tutorial on Adding A Notify Icon in VB6. In this tutorial we will be discussing how to add a system tray icon to your application, and how to get it react to events as right-click, left-click, double-click, how to change the icon at runtime, say you're running a process and you want the icon to be an hourglass, this tutorial will show you how to accomplish that.

Before starting this tutorial, I am assuming you have a firm understanding of Win32 API calls in VB6, user defined data types, and hooking into the Windows API to catch mouse click and such. This tutorial is fairly advanced, and if you haven't worked with these items I would suggest some more beginner tutorials before attempting this one.

Before we get to any code, to use this Class you need to have a form with a PictureBox named pickhook, with your ImageList loaded with the icons you wish to use. The class file will look for that ImageList with your icons, and those are the icons that will be placed in the system tray. Now to some code, which is the reason you're reading this tutorial.

The first thing in our class is a constant specifying the version of Visual Basic, this allows for backwards compatibility:





The next item in our class is a user defined type of NOTIFYICONDATA, this will hold all the data we need about our notify icon, its size, handle, icon and other such data:




Next in our class is a series of Constants required by the Shell_NotifyIcon Win32 API. These will be used for various reasons, to add the icon, to remove the icon, to capture mouse moves and mouse clicks:





Next we will add our Win32 API call for Shell_NotifyIcon, which is located in the shell32.dll:




As with most class files we will need some local variables, here we will have an instance of our NOTIFYICONDATA user defined type, a PictureBox and a variable for the tooltip:




Next we will declare our public mouse Events, which we will raise later in the tutorial for acting on these mouse events:





Now we will take a look at the properties we need for our notify icon class. Read/Write properties have a Let and a Set, Let will retrieve the property, Set will set the value of the property. We have properties for the tool tip to pass to the icon, the icon itself, a property telling the class what the default double-click action is, and finally a property for this source window, this is the Form that is calling the class and manipulating the notify icon:




In the SetSourceWindow Property, we call a procedure named SetPickHook. In this procedure we check the version of VB running and set our local variable pickhook, which is the PictureBox control on our source Form. We then hide the control, set it's current picture to the icon we name, and set the handle to the handle of the PictureBox control we're using:





Now, before we can raise any of the events we declared earlier, we need to initialize our class. In this procedure we will set the values of our NOTIFYICONDATA User Defined Type. So let's take a look at how we do this:





If you remember earlier when we declared our local variables, when we declared the variable for the PictureBox Control we will be using on our Form, we declared it using the WithEvents Keyword. This allows us to raise our events based on the PictureBox Control's MouseMove Event.

In this procedure we will first determine the position of the mouse pointer to ensure we are clicking on the icon, not somewhere else. We will then determine which mouse button is being pressed, and based on this information we will raise the proper event:





For the purposes of this example, the only event we will be raising is the left mouse button click. When the user left clicks on the icon, the Form will be set to its normal state and shown, and the icon will be removed from the system tray. This code can be altered to show a menu when the user does a left click, with different options, like a Context Menu. Since Visual Basic 6 doesn't offer inheritance, we will use a variable to override the default left button click:





The line App.TaskVisible = True will add our application back to the Task Manager list. Next we will take a look at procedures used to manipulate the system tray icon, such as removing it from the tray, adding it to the tray, minimizing your application to the system tray, changing the system tray icon, and finally changing the tool tip of the icon. First we will look at how we remove the icon from the system tray:





The most important part of this procedure is the line Shell_NotifyIcon NIM_DELETE, t, here we pass the constant NIM_REMOVE and our instance of the NOTIFYICONDATA type, this will remove the icon from the system tray. To add the icon to the system tray, say when we minimize the form, we will call Shell_NotifyIcon and pass it the constant NIM_ADD, telling Windows to add the icon to the system tray:





When we minimize our application, we want to add the system tray icon, hide the application, then remove it from the Task Manager list. This will give the appearance that the application was minimized to the system tray:





Now we will look at how we can change the icon displayed at run-time. To accomplish this we pass the icon we want to display, we change the hIcon value of our NOTIFYICONDATA type, then call Shell_NotifyIcon passing the constant NIM_MODIFY to it, telling Windows to change our icon:





The final procedure in our class is used to change the tooltip displayed when the mouse pointer hovers over the system tray icon. To accomplish this we pass the stirng we want displayed, we set the szTip value of our NOTIFYICONDATA type, we call Shell_NotifyIcon passing the constant NIM_MODIFY, telling Windows to change the ToolTip, then we make sure the Window is minimized before setting the ToolTip:





Now that we have all this code, I bet you're wondering how to use it. Well here we will show a couple examples of how to use this in our application. In your Form's code you will want to make a variable that references our class, in my case the class is called NotifyIcon, so I would do:





This now gives me a reference to my class. In the Form's Load Event is where I will set the properties of my Icon class:





To give the affect of minimizing to the system tray when the form is minimized, we will do this in the Form's Resize Event:





That is the end of this tutorial on Adding A Notify Icon in VB6. I will be including the class file for this tutorial for your use. The class is under the GNU General Public License, meaning you can modify and distribute the file as you see fit. I hope you found this tutorial useful and informative, and if you have any questions please post them here, as others may have the same questions as you, and I will get them answered as soon as possible. Thank you for reading.

Happy Coding!
 NotifyIcon.zip ( 2.83k ) Number of downloads: 826

It is mentioned that the code can be altered to show a menu when the user does a left click, with different options, like a Context Menu. I don't know how to start. Any suggestions?