Question

I’m looking for some ideas for alerting a user when a long running process has completed from a winforms application. The process could take a couple minutes or a couple hours depending on their inputs, and more than likely they’ll just minimize the application and work on something else in the meantime. I know I can do something like playing a windows sound like this:

System.Media.SystemSounds.Exclamation.Play();

But most users here in the office don’t have speakers so I don’t think it would be very effective.

What are some other techniques I could do to tell the user, “Wake up!!! Your data is ready for you, finally!!!!”

Thanks!

Answer 1

Some ideas:

• Animated or changed system tray icon
• “Toaster” popup from the system tray (like Outlook, messenger, or some AV apps use)
• Blinking alert in taskbar
• Send an e-mail
• Play a sound/audio alert
• Message box
• Have an indicator in the status bar at the bottom of your app

Of these, I like the system tray icon + toaster pop up the best. Blinking alert in the taskbar is too demanding, e-mail has too much latency and requires too much configuration, audio alerts have the issues you mentioned in the question, message box blocks execution of it’s thread, and a status bar indicator is too subtle.