System Tray Location

Getting the location of the system tray from vb.net or C# isn't terribly hard. But it isn't documented either, so figuring it out takes a little research. The trick here is knowing the names of the taskbar and system tray windows. This can be discovered using the Spy++ tool. For those of you who don't remember the days before .NET, Spy++ is in your Visual Studio tools folder in the start menu. It was once very handy, but I don't remember the last time I used it.

Private Declare Ansi Function FindWindow Lib "user32" Alias "FindWindowA" ( _
    ByVal lpClassName As String, ByVal lpWindowName As String) As IntPtr

Private Declare Ansi Function FindWindowEx Lib "user32" Alias "FindWindowExA" ( _
    ByVal hWnd1 As IntPtr, ByVal hWnd2 As IntPtr, _
    ByVal lpsz1 As String, ByVal lpsz2 As String) As IntPtr

Private Declare Function GetWindowRect Lib "user32.dll" ( _
    ByVal hWnd As IntPtr, ByRef lpRect As RECT) As Boolean

Private Structure RECT
    Public left As Integer
    Public top As Integer
    Public right As Integer
    Public bottom As Integer
End Structure

Private Function GetSystemTrayLocation() As Rectangle
    'Get the location of the system tray

    Dim rect As New RECT
    Dim retval As Rectangle = Nothing

    Dim hTaskbarHandle As IntPtr = FindWindow("Shell_TrayWnd", Nothing)
    If hTaskbarHandle <> 0 Then
        Dim hSystemTray As IntPtr = FindWindowEx(hTaskbarHandle, IntPtr.Zero, _
            "TrayNotifyWnd", Nothing)

        If hSystemTray <> 0 Then
            GetWindowRect(hSystemTray, rect)
            retval = Rectangle.FromLTRB( _
                rect.left, rect.top, rect.right, rect.bottom)
        End If
    End If

    Return retval
End Function