Abhinaba Basu's blog post Animation and Text in System tray using C# explains.
It comes down to:
- making an array of icons each of which represent an animation frame.
- switching the icons in the tray on timer events
- create a bitmap strip. Each frame is 16x16 pixels
- use SysTray.cs
e.g.
private void button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
m_sysTray.StopAnimation();
Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap("tick.bmp");
// the color from the left bottom pixel will be made transparent
bmp.MakeTransparent();
m_sysTray.SetAnimationClip(bmp);
m_sysTray.StartAnimation(150, 5);
}
SetAnimationClip
uses the following code to create the animation frame
public void SetAnimationClip (Bitmap bitmapStrip)
{
m_animationIcons = new Icon[bitmapStrip.Width / 16];
for (int i = 0; i < m_animationIcons.Length; i++)
{
Rectangle rect = new Rectangle(i*16, 0, 16, 16);
Bitmap bmp = bitmapStrip.Clone(rect, bitmapStrip.PixelFormat);
m_animationIcons[i] = Icon.FromHandle(bmp.GetHicon());
}
}
To animate the frame StartAnimation
starts a timer and in the timer the icons are changed to animate the whole sequence.
public void StartAnimation(int interval, int loopCount)
{
if(m_animationIcons == null)
throw new ApplicationException("Animation clip not set with
SetAnimationClip");
m_loopCount = loopCount;
m_timer.Interval = interval;
m_timer.Start();
}
private void m_timer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if(m_currIndex < m_animationIcons.Length)
{
m_notifyIcon.Icon = m_animationIcons[m_currIndex];
m_currIndex++;
}
....
}
Using SysTray
Create and wire up your menu
ContextMenu m_menu = new ContextMenu();
m_menu.MenuItems.Add(0, new MenuItem("Show",new
System.EventHandler(Show_Click)));
Get an icon you want to show statically in the tray.
Create a SysTray object with all the required information
m_sysTray = new SysTray("Right click for context menu",
new Icon(GetType(),"TrayIcon.ico"), m_menu);
Create image strips with the animation frames. For 6 frame strip the image will have a width of 6*16 and height as 16 pixels
Bitmap bmp = new Bitmap("tick.bmp");
// the color from the left bottom pixel will be made transparent
bmp.MakeTransparent();
m_sysTray.SetAnimationClip(bmp);
Start animation indicating how many times you need to loop the animation and the frame delay
m_sysTray.StartAnimation(150, 5);
To stop animation call
m_sysTray.StopAnimation();