Windows Phone 7 System Tray

System Tray is an important part of Windows Phone 7 platform as it displays critical system information and notifications to the user. In this post I will cover basic functionality of system tray, explain how to hide/show system tray in your Windows Phone 7 applications programmatically and demonstrate some status icons.

Basics

• System Tray is located in the top part of a PhoneApplicationFrame (basically Frame consist of Page element and System Tray)
• System Tray is mostly used to display status Icons or system-level notification to user(some of the status icons are shown in the last section of this post)
• In portrait orientation system tray has a height of 32px
• In landscape orientation system tray has a width of 72px
• System Tray is also available in Windows Phone 7 Emulator(image bellow)
  
  
  
  
• To display System Tray in emulator or on an actual device you have to tap the top of the screen
• System Tray usually disappears after a few seconds
• System Tray is not available in full screen mode
• SystemTray is a class of Microsoft.Phone.Shell namespace
  
  

Show/Hide System Tray in applications

To display system tray in XAML page of your application you have to add the following line of code to <phone:PhoneApplicationPage> element (note that by default this attribute is set to True):

To hide system tray in your XAML page you have to set this attribute to False (it will add some additional room for the content of your application page):

Status Icons

Here are some of Windows Phone 7 system tray status icons taken from my HTC Mozart manual.