System Tray Icons and Toast Notifications in Windows Apps — NotifyIcon Pitfalls and Choosing the Right AppNotification API (archived 2026-07-27)

A practical guide to keeping a business Windows app resident in the system tray and notifying users with toast notifications. Covers the correct use of NotifyIcon, the design for "close to tray" behavior, re-registration after Explorer restarts, a decision table for the three toast APIs (Windows App SDK AppNotification / Community Toolkit / Windows.UI.Notifications), constraints for unpackaged apps, cases where notifications don't arrive, and architectures for sending notifications from a Windows service. Archived version of https://comcomponent.com/en/blog/windows-tray-icon-toast-notification-guide/, as published on 2026-07-27. The live article is maintained and may change after this date. First published 2026-07-16.