Question

I want to have it such that left clicking on the NotifyIcon also causes the context menu (set with the ContextMenuStrip property) to open as well. How would I achieve this? Do I have to handle Click and figure out the positioning myself?
Edit: showing the menu with trayIcon.ContextMenuStrip.Show() results is a few undesirable behaviors:

The menu is not shown at the same location as if right click the NotifyIcon (it appears that you can’t set the x and y coords to where the taskbar is, at least on Windows 7 which is what I’m running). It will appear above the task bar (not that big of a deal, but consistency would be nice).

While the menu is shown, there is an extra icon added to the task bar.

Clicking somewhere other than the menu does not close it (whereas if you right click to bring up the context menu clicking else where automatically closes the context menu).

Is it at all possible to just invoke the menu however the built in right click handler is doing it?

Answer 1

You would normally handle the MouseClick event to detect the click and call the ContextMenuStrip.Show() method:

    private void notifyIcon1_MouseClick(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) {
        contextMenuStrip1.Show(Control.MousePosition);
    }

But that doesn’t actually work properly, the CMS won’t close when you click outside of it. Underlying issue is a Windows quirk (aka “bug”) that is described in this KB article.

Invoking this workaround in your own code is pretty painful, the pinvoke is unpleasant. The NotifyIcon class has this workaround in its ShowContextMenu() method, they just made it difficult to get to since it is a private method. Reflection can bypass that restriction. I discovered this hack 5 years ago and nobody reported a problem with it yet. Set the NFI’s ContextMenuStrip property and implement the MouseUp event like this:

using System.Reflection;
...
    private void notifyIcon1_MouseUp(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) {
      if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Left) {
        MethodInfo mi = typeof(NotifyIcon).GetMethod("ShowContextMenu", BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic);
        mi.Invoke(notifyIcon1, null);
      }
    }