C# WinForms: Creating a background notification application

Question

For practical purposes but also as a learning exercise, I am wanting to create notification application to remind me of friend's Birthdays. I would like the application to be running in the background so that it can check the current date against user configured reminders. If a reminder is due then the user is displayed a simple Window that will allow them to snooze or dismiss the notification. I want the application to have user specific notifications (ie User A's notifications are not seen when User B is logged in).

Option 1 - Application launched upon Windows startup: I thought about keeping it simple by checking when to display notifications only when the application starts up. I would then put a shortcut in the Windows Startup folder. However, this probably wouldn't work if the PC is put to sleep and resumed each day.

Option 2 - Application constantly running in background: I then thought about making the application so it minimises to an icon in the System Tray and thus would constantly be running in the background. It would then periodically check when to display notifications.

Option 3 - Using Windows Service with application: I then thought about using a Windows Service to do the periodic checks as to when to display notifications. Obviously, a Windows Service cannot display UI notifications so it would need to use some other mechanism for notification (eg sending an email). An application could then be used to configure settings that the service uses.

Are there any other options that I have not considered which would work better. I'm currently inclined to go with option 2 for my first implementation but could look to move to a better solution afterwards.

TIA

Answer 1

Your option 2 is the optimal one since you are aimed to distinct users and their reminders - your application runs in the context of a particular user, you already know which remainders need to be shown. Of course, you could go for the third option but this way is really need more time to code and the code itself would be more complex. I would go for the second option. As your applications is WinForms, for the periodical checks I would recommend you to use System.Windows.Forms.Timer class.

By the way, showing an icon in the tray notification area does not make your application "run in the background", it is just a convenient way to show your application is up and running.