Visual Basic.NET by Nitin Chopra

System Tray Icon
and Context Menus

First of all we need to create some variables whose values we will assign to the public properties to the object of this class. 

      Dim ctxtMenu As System.Windows.Forms.ContextMenu
      Dim WithEvents menuItem1 As System.Windows.Forms.menuItem
      Dim WithEvents nIcon As System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon

Note that we have declared these variables using WithEvents specifier because we want to trap events corresponding to these objects. For the icon we want to trap Click, DoubleClick events and for menuItems Click event would do.

Now we will initialize these variables in the constructor

     'Add any initialization after the InitializeComponent() call
      Me.components = New System.componentModel.Container
      Me.ctxtMenu = New System.Windows.Forms.ContextMenu
      Me.menuItem1 = New System.Windows.Forms.MenuItem

Now initialize the contextmenu.

     'init context menu
      ctxtMenu.MenuItems.AddRange(New
      System.Windows.Forms.MenuItem(){menuItem1})

Here AddRange method takes an array of objects of type System.Windows.Forms.MenuItem. above we have created a new array of this type and initialized it with our menuItem object menuItem1 (we have only one menuItem till now, to specify more menuItems we will give comma separated values).

Now we will set the index of the menuItem and text to be shown

     'set properties for menu items
      menuItem1.Index = 0
      menuItem1.Text = "Exit"

Now we will actually create the icon.

     'create notify icon
      Me.nIcon = New
      System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon(Me.components)

System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon() takes a parameter – a container which implements the System.componentModel.IContainer interface. In .NET each form class already implements IContainer interface. Private components As System.ComponentModel.IContainer That is why we pass Me.components as the parameter here.

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