Toast++ v1.17 A set of C++ classes to provide an encapsulation for Toast Notifications for Desktop Win32 applications

These are the popups you see from Windows normally in the bottom right of the screen which accumulate into Action Center. These toast notification APIs are exposed as Windows Runtime interfaces but can be used from standard Desktop Win32 applications with some work. The Toast++ classes ease this integration process.

The classes provided are as follows:

CManager provides a class based encapsulation of an IToastNotifier Windows Runtime interface as well as helper functionality for integrating Win32 applications with Toast Notifications.

CToast provides a class based encapsulation of an IToastNotification Windows Runtime interface as well as support for callback notification through this interface. It also provides a method to setup the toast UI via an XML string parameter.

CContent provides a class which allows you to create the XML for toasts using C++ classes and member variables. For more information on the detailed Toast schema, please see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/shell/tiles-and-notifications/toast-xml-schema

CActions, CActionsSnoozeAndDismiss, CAdaptiveGroup, CAdaptiveImage, CAdaptiveSubgroup, CAdaptiveText, CAppLogo, CAttributionText, CAudio, CButton, CButtonDismiss, CButtonSnooze, CContextMenuItem, CGenericBinding, CGenericImage, CGenericText, CHeroImage, CProgressBar, CSelectionBox, CSelectionBoxItem, CTextBox, CVisual & CWin81Binding are all the sub classes used by CContent.

An example of the demo app running along with a couple of popped toasts is shown below:

The enclosed zip file contains the Toast++ source code and a VC 2017 MFC dialog based application which demonstrates most of the classes functionality.

Features

• Provides one C++ Header only module to encapsulate the Windows Toast Notifications most useful to desktop developers. Specifically ToastPP::CToast encapsulates a Windows::UI::Notifications::ToastNotification WinRT class and ToastPP:CManager encapsulates a Windows::UI::Notifications::ToastNotifier class.
• The demo app also includes a fully worked example of using INotificationActivationCallback to implement a COM server which gets notifications from Action Center in your Desktop Win32 application.
• Included in the download is a VC 2017 MFC dialog based application which exercises the Toast++ classes functionality as well as allowing you to try out different style toasts. The toast samples provided in the demo app are based on the samples included in the Notifications Visualizer for Windows 10 store application.

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

v1.17 (28 May 2023)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated module to indicate that it needs to be compiled using /std:c++17. Thanks to Martin Richter for reporting this issue.

v1.16 (2 May 2022)

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

v1.15 (11 December 2021)

• Updated copyright details.
• Updated some SAL annotations and constness for various methods.

v1.14 (4 April 2020)

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

v1.13 (16 September 2019)

• Fixed a number of compiler warnings when the code is compiled with VS 2019 Preview

v1.12 (22 April 2019)

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

v1.11 (2 December 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.
• Updated the sample app to compile against the Windows 10.0.11763.0 SDK which eliminates various VS compiler errors when the code is compiled against earlier versions of the Windows 10 SDK.
• Changed all enum values to enum class

23 January 2018

• Added a number of missing files to the download. Thanks to Mikko Saariki for reporting this issue.

v1.1 (24 June 2017)

• Provision of a number of new classes which provide a C++ object based way of creating the XML for toast notifications instead of having to specify XML text directly. This functionality is based on the UWP Community Toolkit Notifications package. Currently these classes uses MSXML6 rather than the UWP XML parser as I was unable to get the UWP parser to operate correctly. If you know how to fix this, please let me know and I will look into reworking the code.

v1.0 (3 June 2017)

• Initial public release.