Question

Various native applications in Windows Phone 7 (Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) seem to be able to use the SystemTray to display custom text. For example, when you first open the Hotmail app you see a message like “Last Updated X minutes ago”. The text smoothly scrolls in and scrolls out, and while the text is displayed other standard SystemTray icons remain present as well (current time, etc.).

Is it possible to do this in your own application as well? There doesn’t seem to be any way to set the text of a SystemTray. The only solution I can think of is to fake it and hide the SystemTray and display simply a TextBlock in the same location for a short period of time, but getting the exact same type of SystemTray behaviour the native apps have (other icons remain present, text animates in and out) seems hard/impossible.

Answer 1

You cannot do the same but you can do something similiar using ProgressIndicator. You can set its Text property to any text and show it. It will be showing together width progress dots but you may be able to tweak the, setting Value to 0.

ProgressIndicator prog = new ProgressIndicator();
prog.IsIndeterminate = false;
prog.Text = "Your text";
prog.IsVisible = true;
SystemTray.SetProgressIndicator(this, prog);