Before Mango it was a little difficult to put a generic status message at the top of your page. The Mango tools have made this a bit easier by giving developers (more) access to the System Tray. That’s this part:

You are still a bit limited in what you can do (i.e. you can’t actually add or remove icons), but there’s a lot more flexibility than before.

You can access the system tray either in code or XAML using the Microsoft.Shell.SystemTray class. This class has the following dependency properties:

• IsVisible
• Opacity
• BackgroundColor
• ForegroundColor
• ProgressIndicator

While it’s quite exciting to be able to style the status bar, I cried out of joy when I saw the ProgressIndicator property. Why…? Because now I can add progress information to the top of my pages quickly and easily! J

So, I want to add a downloading message and progress bar to the top of my page (above the application title) as follows:

Using XAML, I can add text and a progress bar to a page by dropping the following into the page:

<shell:SystemTray.ProgressIndicator>
    <shell:ProgressIndicator IsIndeterminate="true" IsVisible="True" Text="Click me..." />
</shell:SystemTray.ProgressIndicator>

Or, using code, I can accomplish the same thing by dropping this into my code:

ProgressIndicator progress = new ProgressIndicator
{
    IsVisible = true,
    IsIndeterminate = true,
    Text = "Downloading details..."
};
SystemTray.SetProgressIndicator(this, progress);

Feel free to download my sample application showing how to manipulate the System Tray: