Tray Icon w/ Popups ("Tooltips"?)

Hello all - first post here so please be gentle :)

I've done a fair amount of scripting (Perl, Python, PHP, Bash etc.), but I'm very new to any C/C++ beyond a simple console prog. Put bluntly, the concepts of programming I'm more than happy with, but when it comes to GUI stuff, I'm a genuine newbie.

What I'm looking to do is create a program that sits in the tray and throws up a popup (I'm not sure of what these things are actually called to be honest - I mean the type of notice that Windows Update gives you when it finishes installing updates) on a certain event.

Largely due to my not knowing exactly what these things are called, searching around hasn't yielded much - could anyone shed some light on how to do this (or link me to somewhere that can blow my mind with good info)?

Shell_NotifyIcon is the Shell API that places icons in the notification area.

There are a lot of prereqs to showing an icon though. First you have to have a Window's application with at least one window.

If you are using Visual Studio as your dev environment, create a new Win32 project. It will automatically generate the necessary code for creating a main window.

Many thanks - I'll have a play.

Also take a look at Adding Icons to the System Tray