Question

I’m not sure if what I want to do is appropriate, so I’ll explain a little.

We’ve got a large application that takes a while to load. So we have a splash screen.
The Splash screen causes excessive load time on Remote Desktop (terminal server).
So to alleviate this, we want to hide the splash screen when loading on RDP.
But we still need to at least show the user that the application is loading.

So, I was thinking perhaps just show something in the Taskbar (not the system tray), as it will disappear once the application is fully loaded (and be replaced by the main form’s Task icon).
However any WPF solution I’ve looked at, requires a visible form/window to go with the Taskbar status.

Is there any way of showing something in the Taskbar without showing a WPF window?

Or is there another way of showing application load status without something on the screen?

Answer 1

We had same problem.

On remote desktop, we did following steps…

1. We configured the Splash window to not allow resizing and have only Minimize and Close button.

2. We removed WindowStyle=None setting so that title bar of the Splash window appeared

3. We made the Splash window’s width and height zero. This way all you see on screen is a small blue rectangle of the title bar with Text “Loading… Please Wait …” and minimize and Close button.

4. We used Window’s kernel calls to disable title bar’s Close button too. This way user was not able to cancel the Splash window.

5. So all a user could do is to minimize or restore from taskbar.

When restored, all he sees is a title bar’s blue rectangle with “Loading…” text. This way the window also claimed its place on the task bar but hid its splash animation and user is also aware that the splash screen is loading. For this you can also update the Title bar’s text by appending more fullstops …

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