CTrayNotifyIcon v1.77 An MFC/WTL class to manipulate tray icons

This class encapsulates the Shell_NotifyIcon SDK call. This API is used to create those nifty little icons such as volume control you see in the tray notification area on Windows.

The class hides a lot of the drudgery of calling the API directly and provides a nice clean C++ interface to using it. Overloaded member functions are provided to set and get the ToolTip text, icon and notification window. The class also provides a default implementation to bring up a context menu and provides a default menu item which is executed when you double click the icon. The class also provides auto cleanup and resurrection of icons if the shell unexpectedly crashes.

The enclosed zip file contains the CTrayNotifyIcon source code and also includes a VC 2017 workspace to build a small demonstration app in MFC as well as WTL.

Copyright

• You are allowed to include the source code in any product (commercial, shareware, freeware or otherwise) when your product is released in binary form.
• You are allowed to modify the source code in any way you want except you cannot modify the copyright details at the top of each module.
• If you want to distribute source code with your application, then you are only allowed to distribute versions released by the author. This is to maintain a single distribution point for the source code.

Updates

v1.77 (28 October 2023)

• Fixed an issue where the CTrayNotifyIcon::OnTrayNotification callback method would not work correctly if the m_NotifyIconData.uTimeout member variable gets updated during runtime of client applications. This can occur when you call CTrayNotifyIcon::SetBalloonDetails. Thanks to Maisala Tuomo for reporting this bug.

v1.76 (18 June 2023)

• Updated copyright details.
• Added additional SAL annotations to the code.

v1.75 (21 May 2022)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the code to use C++ uniform initialization for all variable declarations.

v1.74 (18 December 2021)

• Updated copyright details.
• Fixed more Clang-Tidy static code analysis warnings in the code.

v1.73 (12 May 2020)

• Fixed more Clang-Tidy static code analysis warnings in the code.

v1.72 (3 April 2020)

• Updated copyright details.
• Fixed more Clang-Tidy static code analysis warnings in the code.
• Removed internal declaration of various SDK structs. You now need to define NTDDI_VERSION >= NTDDI_VISTA to use the code.

v1.71 (24 December 2019)

• Fixed various Clang-Tidy static code analysis warnings in the code.

v1.70 (15 September 2019)

• Replaced enum with enum class throughout the code

v1.69 (22 April 2019)

• Updated copyright details
• Updated the code to clean compile on VC 2019

v1.68 (7 October 2018)

• Updated copyright details.
• Fixed a number of C++ core guidelines compiler warnings. These changes mean that the code will now only compile on VC 2017 or later.

v1.67 (26 November 2017)

• Updated copyright details.
• Fixed a number of compilation errors when compiled with VC 2017
• Updated the code to compile cleanly when _ATL_NO_AUTOMATIC_NAMESPACE is defined.
• Replaced NULL throughout the codebase with nullptr. This means that the minimum requirement for the framework is now VC 2010.
• Replaced BOOL throughout the codebase with bool.
• Removed all functionality for pre Vista versions of Windows.

v1.66 (27 April 2016)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the code to clean compile on VC 2012 - VC 2015.
• Removed support for CTRAYNOTIFYICON_NOWIN2K preprocessor macro
• Removed various redefines of ShellApi.h constants from the code
• Added SAL annotations to all the code.
• Reworked the definition of the string class to now use a typedef internal to the CTrayNotifyIcon class.
• Updated CTrayNotifyIcon::OnTrayNotification to handle NOTIFYICON_VERSION_4 style notifications.
• Reworked the internal storage of the animation icons to use ATL::CHeapPtr

v1.65 (26 November 2010)

• Minor update to use DBG_UNREFERENCED_LOCAL_VARIABLE macro. Thanks to Jukka Ojanen for prompting this update.

v1.64 (6 November 2010)

• Minor update to code in SetTooltipText to code which handles unreferenced variable compiler warning
• Implemented a GetTooltipMaxSize method which reports the maximum size which the tooltip can be for a tray icon. Thanks to Geert van Horrik for this nice addition
• All places which copy text to the underlying NOTIFYICONDATA now use the _TRUNCATE parameter in their call to the Safe CRT runtime. This change in behaviour means that client apps will no longer crash if they supply data larger than this Windows structure can accommodate. Thanks to Geert van Horrik for prompting this update.
• All calls to sizeof(struct)/sizeof(first element) have been replaced with _countof
• Fixed a linker error when compiling the WTL sample app in release mode.

v1.63 (10 July 2010)

• Updated the sample app to compile cleanly on VS 2010.
• Fixed a bug in CTrayNotifyIcon::Delete where the code would ASSERT if the tray notify icon was never actually created. Thanks to "trophim" for reporting this bug.

v1.62 (10 April 2010)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the project settings to more modern default values.
• Updated the WTL version of LoadIcon to use the more modern ModuleHelper class from WTL to get the resource instance. Thanks to "Yarp" for reporting this issue.
• The class now has support for the Windows 7 "NIIF_RESPECT_QUIET_TIME" flag. This value can be set via the new "bQuietTime" parameter to the Create method.
• Updated the code which does version detection of the Shell version

v1.61 (22 June 2008)

• Code now compiles cleanly using Code Analysis (/analyze)
• Updated code to compile correctly using _ATL_CSTRING_EXPLICIT_CONSTRUCTORS define
• Removed VC 6 style AppWizard comments from the code.
• The code now only supports VC 2005 or later.

v1.60 (12 March 2008)

• Updated copyright details
• Fixed a bug in SetBalloonDetails where the code did not set the flag NIF_ICON if a user defined icon was being set. Thanks to "arni" for reporting this bug.
• Updated the sample app to clean compile on VC 2008

v1.59 (13 October 2007)

• Subclassing of the top level window is now not done internally by the CTrayNotifyIcon class using the CTrayIconHooker class. Instead now a hidden top level window is created for each tray icon you create and these look after handling the tray resurrection and animated icon timer messages. This refactoring of the internals of the class now also fixes a bug where an application which creates multiples tray icons would only get one icon recreated when the tray resurrection message was received. Thanks to Steven Dwyer for prompting this update.
• Updated the MFC sample app to correctly initialize ATL for VC 6

v1.58 (15 June 2007)

• Updated copyright messages.
• If the code detects that MFC is not included in the project, the code uses the standard preprocessor define "_CSTRING_NS" to declare the string class to use rather than explicitly using WTL::CString. Thanks to Krzysztof Suszka for reporting this issue.
• Updated sample app to compile cleanly on VC 2005.
• Addition of a "BOOL bShow" to all the Create methods. This allows you to create an icon without actually showing it. This avoids the flicker which previously occurred if you created the icon and then immediately hid the icon. Thanks to Krzysztof Suszka for providing this suggestion.
• Demo app now initially creates the first icon as hidden for demonstration purposes.
• Added support for NIIF_LARGE_ICON. This Vista only feature allows you to create a large balloon icon.
• Added support for NIF_REALTIME. This Vista only flag allows you to specify not to bother showing the balloon if it is delayed due to the presence of an existing balloon.
• Added support for NOTIFYICONDATA::hBalloonIcon. This Vista only feature allows you to create a user specified balloon icon which is different to the actual tray icon.
• LoadIconResource method now includes support for loading large icons and has been renamed to simply LoadIcon. Also two overridden versions of this method have been provided which allow the hInstance resource ID to be specified to load the icon from.
• Reworked the internal code to CTrayNotifyIcon which detects the shell version.
• Updated the tray icon text in the demo app to better demonstrate the features of the class.
• Updated the WTL sample to be consistent with the MFC sample code
• Updated comments in documentation about usage of the Platform SDK.

v1.57 (15 September 2006)

• Fixed a bug where WM_DESTROY messages were not been handled correctly for the top level window which the CTrayIconHooker class subclasses in order to handle the tray resurrection message, the animation timers and auto destroying of the icons when the top level window is destroyed. Thanks to Edward Livingston for reporting this bug.
• Fixed a bug where the tray icons were not being recreated correctly when we receive the "TaskbarCreated" message when Explorer is restarted. Thanks to Nuno Esculcas for reporting this bug.
• Split the functionality of hiding versus deleting and showing versus creating of the tray icon into 4 separate functions, namely Delete(), Create(), Hide() and Show(). Note that Hide and Show functionality is only available on Shell v5 or later.
• Fixed an issue with recreation of tray icons which use a dynamic icon created from a bitmap (through the use of BitmapToIcon).
• CTrayNotifyIcon::LoadIconResource now loads up an icon as a shared icon resource using LoadImage. This should avoid resource leaks using this function.

v1.56 (19 August 2006)

• Updated the code to operate independent of MFC if so desired. This requires WTL which is an open source library extension for ATL to provide UI support along the lines of MFC. Thanks to zhiguo zhao for providing this very nice addition.

v1.55 (19 July 2006)

• The default menu item can now be customized via SetDefaultMenuItem and GetDefaultMenuItem. Thanks to Mikhail Bykanov for suggesting this nice update.
• Optimized CTrayNotifyIcon constructor code

v1.54 (6 July 2006)

• Reverted the change made for v1.53 where the screen coordinates used to show the context menu use the current message's screen coordinates. Instead the pre v1.53 mechanism which uses the current cursor's screen coordinates is now used. Thanks to Itamar Syn-Hershko for reporting this issue.

v1.53 (5 July 2006)

• Fixed a bug where the menu may pop up a second time after a menu item is chosen on Windows 2000. The problem was tracked down to the code in CTrayNotifyIcon::OnTrayNotification. During testing of this bug, I was unable to get a workable solution using the new shell messages of WM_CONTEXTMENU, NIN_KEYSELECT & NIN_SELECT on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This means that the code in CTrayNotifyIcon::OnTrayNotification uses the old way of handling notifications (WM_RBUTTDOWN*). This does mean that by default, client apps which use the CTrayNotifyIcon class will not support the new keyboard and mouse semantics for tray icons (IMHO this is no big loss!). Client code is of course free to handle their own notifications. If you go down this route then I would advise you to thoroughly test your application on Windows 2000 and Windows XP as my testing has shown that there is significant differences in how tray icons handle their messaging on these 2 operating systems. Thanks to Edwin Geng for reporting this issue.
• Class now displays the menu based on the current message's screen coordinates, rather than the current cursor screen coordinates.
• Fixed bug in sample app where if the about dialog is already up and it is reactivated from the tray menu, it did not bring itself into the foreground

v1.52 (3 July 2006)

• Fixed a bug where the HideIcon functionality did not work on Windows 2000. This was related to how the cbSize member of the NOTIFYICONDATA structure was initialized. The code now dynamically determines the correct size to set at runtime according to the instructions provided by the MSDN documentation for this structure. As a result of this, all "bWin2k" parameters which were previously exposed via CTrayNotifyIcon have now been removed as there is no need for them. Thanks to Edwin Geng for reporting this important bug. Client code will still need to intelligently make decisions on what is supported by the OS. For example balloon tray icons are only supported on Shell v5 (nominally Windows 2000 or later). CTrayNotifyIcon will ASSERT if for example calls are made to it to create a balloon tray icon on operating systems with < Shell v5.

v1.51 (27 June 2006)

• Code now uses new C++ style casts rather than old style C casts where necessary.
• The class framework now requires the Platform SDK if compiled using VC 6.
• Updated the logic of the ASSERTs which validate the various string lengths.
• Fixed a bug in CTrayNotifyIcon::SetFocus() where the cbSize value was not being set correctly.
• CTrayIconHooker class now uses ATL's CWindowImpl class in preference to the author's CHookWnd class. This does mean that for MFC only client projects, you will need to add ATL support to your project.
• Optimized CTrayIconHooker constructor code.
• Updated code to compile cleanly using VC 2005. Thanks to "Itamar" for prompting this update.
• Addition of a CTRAYNOTIFYICON_EXT_CLASS and CTRAYNOTIFYICON_EXT_API macros which makes the class easier to use in an extension dll.
• Made CTrayNotifyIcon destructor virtual

v1.50 (3 March 2006)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated the documentation to use the same style as the web site.
• Did a spell check of the documentation.
• Fixed some issues when the code is compiled using /Wp64. Please note that to support this the code now requires a recentish Platform SDK to be installed if the code is compiled with Visual C++ 6.
• Replaced all calls to ZeroMemory with memset.
• Fixed an issue where SetBalloonDetails was not setting the cbSize parameter. Thanks to Enrique Granda for reporting this issue.
• Added support for NIIF_USER and NIIF_NONE flags.
• Now includes support for NIM_NIMSETVERSION via SetVersion. In addition this is now automatically set in the Create() calls if the Win2k boolean parameter is set.
• Removed derivation from CObject as it was not really needed.
• Now includes support for NIM_SETFOCUS
• Added support for NIS_HIDDEN via the ShowIcon and HideIcon methods.
• Added support for NIIF_NOSOUND

v1.49 (23 July 2004)

• Minor update to remove unnecessary include of "resource.h"

v1.48 (2 April 2003)

• Now uses v1.06 of my Hookwnd class
• Fixed a bug in the sample app for this class where the hooks should have been created as global instances rather than as member variables of the mainframe window. This ensures that the hooks remain valid even after calling DefWindowProc on the mainframe.

v1.47 (31 March 2003)

• Now uses v1.05 of my Hookwnd class

v1.46 (21 March 2003)

• Fixed icon resource leaks in SetIcon(LPCTSTR lpIconName) and SetIcon(UINT nIDResource). Thanks to Egor Pervouninski for reporting this.
• Fixed unhooking of the tray icon when the notification window is being closed.

25 November 2002

• Added a comment to the NTray.h header file about where to get the HookWnd.h file if the code compile fails.

v1.45 (28 August 2001)

• Added support for direct access to the System Tray's HDC. This allows you to generate an icon for the tray on the fly using GDI calls. The idea came from the article by Jeff Heaton in the April issue of WDJ. Also added are overriden Create methods to allow you to easily costruct a dynamic tray icon given a BITMAP instead of an ICON.

v1.44 (26 August 2001)

• Fixed memory leak in RemoveIcon.
• Fixed GPF in RemoveIcon by removing call to Unhook

v1.43 (13 June 2001)

• Now removes windows hook upon call to RemoveIcon.

v1.42 (10 February 2001)

• Now fully supports creation of 2 tray icons at the same time.

v1.41 (1 January 2001)

• Now includes copyright message in the source code and documentation. 
• Fixed problem where the window does not get focus after double clicking on the tray icon.
• Now fully supports the Windows 2000 balloon style tooltips.
• Fixed a off by one problem in some of the ASSERT's.
• Fixed problems with Unicode build configurations.
• Provided Win2k specific build configurations.

21 May 2000

• Minor update to the documentation.

26 May 1999

• A new version of Shaun Wilde's port of CTrayNotifyIcon is now available. The class is now based on v1.4 of my MFC class

v1.4 (16 May 1999)

• Modified the sample program to ensure that 16*16 icons are used when tray icon animation is not being used.
• Now uses the author's hookwnd class. This prevents the need to create the two hidden windows namely CTrayRessurectionWnd and CTrayTimerWnd to handle icon animation and tray creation messages.
• Sample project now compiles at warning level 4.
• General code tidy up and rearrangement.
• Added numerous ASSERT's to improve the code's robustness.
• Added functions to allow context menu to be customized

11 May 1999

• Another update to the ATL port of CTrayNotifyIcon is now available.

10 May 1999

• A new version of Shaun Wilde's port of CTrayNotifyIcon is now available. The class is now based on v1.33 of my MFC class

v1.33 (9 May 1999)

• Fixed a problem as documented in KB article "PRB: Menus for Notification Icons Do Not Work Correctly", Article ID: Q135788.
• Also available is a port of the code to ATL which has been done by Shaun Wilde. This is available in this zip file.

v1.32 (28 January 1999)

• Removed a number of level 4 warnings which were occurring

v1.31 (27 January 1999)

• Code now correctly loads up 16*16 icons, previously it allowed Windows to rescale the icon from 32*32 resulting in slightly blurry images. This has been accomplished via the new LoadIconResource method.

v1.3 (22 July 1998)

• Code now compiles cleanly at warning level 4
• Code is now UNICODE enabled + build configurations are provided
• The documentation for the class has been completely revamped

v1.2 (23 June 1998)

• Class now supports the new Taskbar Creation Notification message which comes with IE 4. This allows the tray icon to be recreated whenever the explorer restarts (Crashes!!)

v1.1 (25 November 1997)

• Addition of HideIcon(), ShowIcon() & MoveToExtremeRight() functions.
• Support for animated tray icons

v1.0 (14 May 1997)

• Initial Public release.