CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#wpfwinformsvsto
animaonline
animaonline

Reputation: 3804

Displaying WPF-"NotifyIcon" on a separate thread

I am currently working on an office add-in and I need to show a notification dialog that displays progress, I'm using Philipp Sumi's wpf-notifyicon.

I need to display the notifyicon from a separate thread as I have a lot of code that already executes on the main thread, this causes the wpf-notifyicon to block and wait because the messages in the windows message queue are not being processed.

I know that I should rather execute this time consuming code on a separate thread, and display the notifyicon from the main thread and update it accordingly, but that is unfortunately not an alternative because this whole solution is single-threaded.

Example:

    private FancyPopup fancyPopup;

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        notifyIcon = new TaskbarIcon();
        notifyIcon.Icon = Resources.Led;

        fancyPopup = new FancyPopup();

        Thread showThread = new Thread(delegate()
        {
            notifyIcon.ShowCustomBalloon(fancyPopup, System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.PopupAnimation.Fade, null);
        });

        showThread.Start();
    }

    private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        fancyPopup.TextB.Text = "Doing something...";

        //Keep the main thread busy.
        Thread.Sleep(5000);

        fancyPopup.TextB.Text = "Done doing something...";
    }

Update I have been able to progress a little further with this updated code:

I'm creating the TaskbarIcon object on a new thread , and using Application.Run to process the application message loop on that thread...

    private FancyPopup fancyPopup;

    private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Thread showThread = new Thread(delegate()
        {
            notifyIcon = new TaskbarIcon();
            notifyIcon.Icon = Resources.Led;

            fancyPopup = new FancyPopup();


            notifyIcon.ShowCustomBalloon(fancyPopup, System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.PopupAnimation.Fade, null);

            System.Windows.Forms.Application.Run();
        });

        showThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
        showThread.Start();
    }

    private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        fancyPopup.Dispatcher.Invoke(new Action(delegate
        {
            fancyPopup.TextB.Text = "Doing something...";
        }));

        //Keep the main thread busy.
        Thread.Sleep(5000);

        fancyPopup.Dispatcher.Invoke(new Action(delegate
        {
            fancyPopup.TextB.Text = "Done doing something..."; 
        }));
    }

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3094

Answers (1)

animaonline
animaonline

Reputation: 3804

I have solved my problem, I had to initialize the notifyIcon on a separate STA thread and use Application.Run in order to start pumping windows messages on that thread.

        var myThread = new Thread(delegate()
        {
            notifyIcon = new NotifyIcon();

            Application.Run();
        });

        myThread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
        myThread.Start();

Then I just had to Invoke the UI of my notification dialog.

Upvotes: 3

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