WPF Application that only has a tray icon

You have to use the NotifyIcon control from System.Windows.Forms, or alternatively you can use the Notify Icon API provided by Windows API. WPF Provides no such equivalent, and it has been requested on Microsoft Connect several times.

I have code on GitHub which uses System.Windows.Forms NotifyIcon Component from within a WPF application, the code can be viewed at https://github.com/wilson0x4d/Mubox/blob/master/Mubox.QuickLaunch/AppWindow.xaml.cs

Here are the summary bits:

Create a WPF Window with ShowInTaskbar=False, and which is loaded in a non-Visible State.

At class-level:

private System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon notifyIcon = null;

During OnInitialize():

notifyIcon = new System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon();
notifyIcon.Click += new EventHandler(notifyIcon_Click);
notifyIcon.DoubleClick += new EventHandler(notifyIcon_DoubleClick);
notifyIcon.Icon = IconHandles["QuickLaunch"];

During OnLoaded():

notifyIcon.Visible = true;

And for interaction (shown as notifyIcon.Click and DoubleClick above):

void notifyIcon_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    ShowQuickLaunchMenu();
}

From here you can resume the use of WPF Controls and APIs such as context menus, pop-up windows, etc.

It's that simple. You don't exactly need a WPF Window to host to the component, it's just the most convenient way to introduce one into a WPF App (as a Window is generally the default entry point defined via App.xaml), likewise, you don't need a WPF Wrapper or 3rd party control, as the SWF component is guaranteed present in any .NET Framework installation which also has WPF support since it's part of the .NET Framework (which all current and future .NET Framework versions build upon.) To date, there is no indication from Microsoft that SWF support will be dropped from the .NET Framework anytime soon.

Hope that helps.

It's a little cheese that you have to use a pre-3.0 Framework Component to get a tray-icon, but understandably as Microsoft has explained it, there is no concept of a System Tray within the scope of WPF. WPF is a presentation technology, and Notification Icons are an Operating System (not a "Presentation") concept.

There's no NotifyIcon for WPF.

A colleague of mine used this freely available library to good effect:

• http://www.hardcodet.net/wpf-notifyicon (blog post)
• https://github.com/hardcodet/wpf-notifyicon (source code)
• https://www.nuget.org/packages/Hardcodet.NotifyIcon.Wpf/ (NuGet package)
• http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/aacbc77c-4ef6-456f-80b7-1f157c2909f7/