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I am looking for a way to pin my application's icon to the system tray during my application's msi installation. Dropbox seems to do this exact thing during its installation so I am confident that it is possible.

After the msi is finished running, the application starts and can be found in the system tray area but only by clicking the white view more arrow as shown below. Notice how dropbox automatically sits on the actual tray by default.

Application icon when not pinned

I can manually pin my application icon by dragging it from the menu shown above down onto the tray next to the dropbox icon. After doing that, my application is always visible like dropbox as shown below:

Application icon after manually pinning it

My question is what do I have to do during installation with the msi (I am using wix) so that the application is pinned, similar to dropbox, by default as shown above?

I have found many questions and answers on stack overflow about pinning to the task bar by default but that is different and not what I am looking for. I am looking for how to pin it to the system tray by default.

Thanks

Alec
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1 Answers1

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The notification area (aka tray) isn't like an alternate taskbar. Your app has to know how to create a notification icon at runtime. The Windows SDK documents what you have to do to create a notification icon.

Bob Arnson
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  • Hi Bob, Thanks for the response. Unless I misunderstand your response, I think I am already creating the icon. My icon is the blue icon with a white key that I circled in the first and second picture. I want to figure out how dropbox automatically got their icon always visible instead of hidden in the more options tray like mine is by default. – Alec Dec 12 '17 at 20:56
  • Windows intentionally doesn't allow software to promote itself that way -- users are in charge of their notification area. If Dropbox is doing something, they're breaking the rules in an unsupported manner. – Bob Arnson Dec 13 '17 at 02:53