There was one reason why I sat down to write this class. And as is usually
the case, necessity is the mother of invention.
Well, it started off like this. I had a time consuming task going on and
during this time I wanted to have an animated tray icon to appear in the tray
to indicate the ongoing task. When this task got over, I needed a way to
remove this. The examples I’d seen earlier couldn’t by themselves address to
my problem as, the task which I was performing was on a thread and since it
didn’t have any window, there was no proper way to set a timer or whatever to
animate the icon in the tray. So, I was looking at some way to accomplish the
same by making the animation to happen on a different thread than the one in
which it is being invoked.
Basically, my anitrayicon class’ constructor starts off by creating a thread
and then this Thread Procedure creates an invisible window.
The handle to this window is set into anitrayicon object’s m_hWnd. All
further messages to the tray icon are basically messages sent to this window.
Thus, the main function of the WndProc for the Trayicon window is to wait for
messages and call various Shell_Notifyicon() to accomplish the desired action
and to animate the icon on a WM_TIMER message.
Here is how one uses it :
Using the AnimatedTrayIcon class
Have an object on the stack / heap.
void myFunc()
{
AnimatedTrayIcon oTrayIcon;
HICON* hIconArray = new HICON[5];
hIconArray[0] = LoadIcon(............);//handle to icon 1
hIconArray[1] = LoadIcon(............);//handle to icon 2
hIconArray[2] = LoadIcon(............);//handle to icon 3
hIconArray[3] = LoadIcon(............);//handle to icon 4
hIconArray[4] = LoadIcon(............);//handle to icon 5
oTrayIcon.SetFrameIconInfo(hIconArray,5);
oTrayIcon.SetFrameRate(250);//in ms
oTrayIcon.Start();
..
..
..
..
//u can stop the tray icon here if u want by calling
oTrayIcon.Stop();
..
..
//and then restart it at a later stage by calling
..
oTrayIcon.Continue();
//long process.....
//one needn't necessarily call Remove() if that is the only tray icon one
//needs to have the destructor automatically removes the icon
}