The system tray, also called the Notification Area, is the little area of icons next to your system clock. Certain programs, espeically those that are designed to run in the background all the time, look much better minimized to the system tray rather than taking up space in the windows taskbar. Here's a .bas module I created for Visual Basic which allows you to easily minimize your program to the system tray with only a few lines of code. You simply add the module to your project, then copy and paste the code below into your form.

Download SystemTray.bas (March 28, 2009)

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I've always been fascinated by clipboard monitoring programs, you know those little programs that sit in the background and record everything that gets copied to the windows clipboard. However, sometimes it's difficult to find these types of programs in search engines because they're known by so many different names. After spending a number of hours searching in Google and other various shareware sites I was able to compile this list of windows clipboard monitoring programs:

ClipX
Hamsin Clipboard
CLCL
Ditto
ArsClip
Clipdiary
Visual Clipboard
ClipGuru
Yankee Clipper III
Clipboard Recorder
ReClip
TrayClip
Clip-O-Matic
ClipMate
Clipboard Genie
Clipboard Helper

All of these programs do basically the same thing, they monitor and record the windows clipboard. But how exactly do they do it? I recently looked online for some type of guide or tutorial that could show me how it's done in Visual Basic but I couldn't find anything so I decided to write my own. Before writing this guide, I wanted to find out as much information as I could about the windows clipboard and more specifically how clipboard monitoring works. I found two great books on the subject, Programming Windows by Charles Petzold and Subclassing and Hooking with Visual Basic by Stephen Teilhet for Visual Basic specific information. Both of which are excellent and I highly suggest picking them up.

Here's a simple step-by-step guide that shows how to create your own Visual Basic program that can monitor what gets copied into the windows clipboard.

Download clipboard_monitor.zip (March 11, 2009)

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