Developing a simple Windows system tray desktop app to consume a .NET web service

Question

I'm required to develop a simple Windows system tray desktop app to consume a .NET web service but I'm proficient in PHP, and I have little background in desktop applications. What platform would you advise me to use, preferably with a very low learning curve?

The system tray app will show (in a context menu) a counter of notifications of new events as received from the .NET web service; and will also write all the event logs into a text file.

I'm already thinking Adobe AIR or C# .NET but I want to know if there are any better options that I can learn quickly to develop the app.

Answer 1

Keep it all in .NET. You can easily write a Windows Forms application to display a tray icon and display notifications as and when something happens in the web service (you'd probably need a timer to do the polling).

There are plenty of articles around that will show you how to do this. Here's one to get you started:

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/290013/Formless-System-Tray-Application

Answer 2

I assume that you have to use WPF and MVVM so it is going to be really awesome app.

And the best example I found is that one

WPF NotifyIcon http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/36468/WPF-NotifyIcon