In Sweden, I don’t know why, we’re very week number centric. Questions like the ones listed below are not uncommon:

– “What weeks will you have vacation”
– “Can you be done by week 42?”

What I have to do then is to switch into Outlook, Ctrl+2 my way to the calendar and switch to monthly view where I have week numbers enabled.

As you can imagine this really upsets a productivity-geek-wannabe as me. So, Visual Studio to the rescue (as always ;)). I wrote a little application which sole purpose in life is to show me what week it is in the system tray.

As always I googled it with bing first and found some good inspiration and how-to info. I found a good article on CodeProject wich showed me pretty much how to do what I wanted.

Here the specifics.

I created a Console Application project in Visual Studio and got rid of the default stuff.

I then created the TrayWeekApplicationContext class which inherits from ApplicationContext. From there I do everything. In the Constructor I hook up timer, update event, context menu and NotifyIcon. The timer ticks once an hour, after all how often am I going to stare at the thing Sunday evening at midnight?

private NotifyIcon _notifyIcon;
private IContainer _components;
private Timer _timer;
private ContextMenuStrip _contextMenu;


public TrayWeekApplicationContext()
{
    _components = new Container();
    _notifyIcon = new NotifyIcon(_components);

    _notifyIcon.Visible = true;

    UpdateUi();

    //Set timer to redraw
    _timer = new Timer();
    _timer.Elapsed += TimerElapsed;
    _timer.Interval = 60*60*1000; //Hourly update
    _timer.Enabled = true;
    _timer.Start();

    //Initialize context menu
    InitContextMenu();
}

The interesting stuff (if you call it that, it’s not rocket science directly) happens in the UpdateUi() method:

private void UpdateUi()
{
    Graphics graphics;
    Font font;

    Image image = TrayWeekResources.date;

    using (graphics = Graphics.FromImage(image))
    {
        int weekNo = DateHelper.GetCurrentWeekNumber(DateTime.Now);

        font = new Font("Lucida Console", 18, FontStyle.Regular);
        SizeF size = graphics.MeasureString(weekNo.ToString(), font);
        Point startingPoint = CalculateStartingPoint(size);

        graphics.DrawString(weekNo.ToString(), font, Brushes.GhostWhite, startingPoint);

        SetBaloonTip(weekNo);

        _notifyIcon.Icon = ImageToIcon(image);
    }
}

Here you can se how I get an icon and draw the text upon it. And that’s about that.

You can download the Visual Studio 2010 project here. And be aware, there is a lot of hard coded stuff, such as Swedish localization, that should be promoted to a settings dialog or retrieved from Regional Options.