Determining location of tray icon

My application is designed to sit in the system tray and behave similarly to the Network/Volume/Power/Action Centre tray items in Windows 7 (and the equivalent items in Windows Vista). That is, it become开发者_JAVA技巧s visible when the tray icon is clicked, and becomes hidden when focus is lost.

The application is written in WPF, but I am currently using NotifyIcon from WinForms for the tray icon.

I would like to know if anyone has any suggestions as to how I might determine the position (i.e. screen coordinates) of my application's tray icon. The default Windows Vista/7 tray items have some way of doing this, since the pop-out windows are centre-aligned above the relevant tray icon.

In Vista this wasn't much of an issue: I had the application permanently set to the bottom-right corner, and this looked fine (though there was no logic included for cases when the taskbar wasn't placed at the bottom of the screen). However, in Windows 7 my application ends up obscuring the new system tray pop-out box, rather than hovering above it like the volume controls, etc., do.

The best solution I've seen in my searches so far is to handle the mouse-up event on the NotifyIcon and use the mouse coordinates to determine the position of the icon. I think I'll end up using this method if unless someone has a better idea, though it's not ideal as the position will vary slightly depending on where within the icon the user clicks.

Windows 7 and higher expose the Shell_NotifyIconGetRect() function, which returns the screen coordinates of the icon's bounding rectangle.

You'll need to provide it the notify icon GUID, though, and I don't know if you can access that property through the managed NotifyIcon class.

Further to this, I've written about a method to find the location of a notify icon when the Shell_NotifyIconGetRect function is not available: http://blog.quppa.net/2010/12/28/windows-7-style-notification-area-applications-in-wpf-part-6-notify-icon-position-pre-windows-7/