How to display seconds in the system tray of the Windows 11 taskbar

user_2497570 0
Viewed 383

As we know, Microsoft choosed not to display seconds in Windows 11 system tray taskbar. Thus, I decided to create a little tool.

A simple timer and a label to show seconds next to the clock. The code I'm using is:


Public Class Form1
    Private Sub Form1_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
        Me.StartPosition = FormStartPosition.Manual
        Me.Location = New Point(1891, 1029)
        Me.Size = New Size(21, 18)

        Me.TransparencyKey = Color.LightBlue
        Me.BackColor = Color.LightBlue
    End Sub
    Private Sub Timer1_Tick(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles Timer1.Tick
        Label1.Text = ":" + Format(Now, "ss")
    End Sub
End Class

Always on top property is on true but if I click on the taskbar the form will disappear from there. Is there a way to fix it? thanks

windows-11 vb.net
2 Answers

It is disappearing because it is losing focus. If you want it to continuously keep focus or "refocus", you can introduce a hacky method that will refocus the form on each timer tick.

So you could try adding Me.Focus() to the timer1_tick event.

An example of this was shared on this SO post.

user_104908370

After a while, I decided to keep developing this little tool and for some reasons, the position of the form was moving up everytime there was a notification, so I end up forcing the position using the follow code inside of a System.Timers.Timer object that fires its Timer.Tick event every 0,1 seconds (100 milliseconds)

 Me.StartPosition = FormStartPosition.Manual
        Me.Location = New Point(1897, 1039)
        Me.Size = New Size(21, 18)
        Me.TransparencyKey = Color.LightBlue
        Me.BackColor = Color.LightBlue
        Label1.Text = Format(Now, "ss")
        Me.TopMost = True

Simple, but efficient.

user_24975700
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