Create popup “toaster” notifications in Windows with .NET

Question

I am using .NET and am creating a desktop app/service that will display notifications in the corner of my Desktop when certain events are triggered. I don\'t want to use a r

Answer 1

WPF makes this absolutely trivial: It would proably take ten minutes or less. Here are the steps:

1. Create a Window, set AllowsTransparency="true" and add a Grid to it
2. Set the Grid's RenderTransform to a ScaleTransform with origin of 0,1
3. Create an animation on the grid that animates the ScaleX 0 to 1 then later animates the Opacity from 1 to 0
4. In the constructor calculate Window.Top and Window.Left to place the window in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

That's all there is to it.

Using Expression Blend it took about 8 minutes me to generate the following working code:

  

    
    
      
        
          Notification data
          Something just happened and you are being notified of it.
        
        
        
      
    

    
    
      
        
          
            
              
              
            
            
              
              
            
          
        
      
    

    
      
    

  

With code behind:

using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Threading;

public partial class NotificationWindow
{
  public NotificationWindow()
  {
    InitializeComponent();

    Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(DispatcherPriority.ApplicationIdle, new Action(() =>
    {
      var workingArea = System.Windows.Forms.Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea;
      var transform = PresentationSource.FromVisual(this).CompositionTarget.TransformFromDevice;
      var corner = transform.Transform(new Point(workingArea.Right, workingArea.Bottom));

      this.Left = corner.X - this.ActualWidth - 100;
      this.Top = corner.Y - this.ActualHeight;
    }));
  }
}

Since WPF is one of the regular .NET libraries, the answer is yes, it is possible to accomplish this with the "regular .NET libraries".

If you're asking if there is a way to do this without using WPF the answer is still yes, but it is extremely complex and will take more like 5 days than 5 minutes.