Alex Little

Had fun this morning figuring out how to get the context menu for MSG Alert to display the same context menu when you right or left click on it. You’d think that ought to be very easy to do (and it is when you know how) but it was totally non obvious to me – the NotifyIcon class only has click, doubleclick, mouseclick etc methods, there aren’t any methods which deal solely with left or right clicks.

I tried a variety of approaches (from the number of messages in forums etc this isn’t a new problem!!), most of which used the NotifyIcon.ContextMenu.Show() method. However when I tried this, although the menu appeared fine, a blank item appeared in the taskbar, which looked really horrible!!! In the ended I opted for the method described here. This seemed to be the only reliable way of doing it.

Whilst doing this I also ‘upgraded’ my menu from ContextMenu to a ContextMenuStrip to take advantage of being able to add icons etc etc.

Just about finished rewriting MSGAlert in visual c# and we’re now just testing it all out. Has been fairly painless – well, once we decided to go with c# instead of c++. So now users will see a balloon tool tip in the taskbar notification area when a new message is received and should stop some of the problems/comments we had where users didn’t find the notification of a new message to be obvious enough!

Hopefully we’ll not find very many bugs or issues and I can get on with the Google maps that I was playing with before

So, after a couple of weeks messing around (and to be honest – not getting very far!!!) with Visual C++ finally decided that it was probably best to go with Visual C# .NET instead. C# is much more ‘understandable’ to me, having done Java before, and hope that should make the code much easier to develop and maintain. In fact I’ve got further in couple of days with C# than I had with 2 weeks of C++, and with each I was starting at the same level, I’d not used either before.

Have even got as far (in the recoded MSG Alert program) as connecting up to the server, sending and receiving responses, so I think the ‘hard’ bits are all done, and I just need to spend some time putting it all together