Develop a program that runs in the background in .NET?

Question

I have made a small program in C# that I want to run in the background and it should only appear when a certain key combination is pressed. How can I do this?

Answer 1

To allow the program to be completely invisible is, in my opinion, a bad idea. Because the user cannot interact with the program. I would recommend placing it in the SysTray (an icon by the clock in Windows)

    trayIcon      = new NotifyIcon();
    trayIcon.Text = "My application";
    trayIcon.Icon = TheIcon

    // Add menu to the tray icon and show it.
    trayIcon.ContextMenu = trayMenu;
    trayIcon.Visible     = true;

    Visible       = false; // Hide form window.
    ShowInTaskbar = false; // Remove from taskbar.

To monitor keyboard you can use LowLevel Keyboard hook ( see example ) or attach a hootkey (See example)