Toast Notifications

We get a number of questions on how we do our “toast” notification in the add-in samples. The toast notification is the pop-up dialog that appears in the lower right portion of the screen. A common example of this which most of us have seen is the new mail message Outlook displays. The toast notification is a nice way to present some information to the user that doesn’t interrupt their current workflow and gives them the decision on when to take action.

We have approached the toast notification in a couple different ways. Our first iteration of the toast notification leveraged some of the UI utility classes from the DevComponents DotNetBar (http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/). DevComponents provided us a quick and elegant solution but requires a license for the DevComponents DotNetBar. For those that have the option to license or already have a license for Devcomponents DotNetBar this provides a nice solution for toast notifications.

Our latest approach to the toast notification was to develop our own reusable library that displays toast notifications. The library allows you to define your own UserControl to display on the toast notification. The toast notification will resize itself to display your entire UserControl. Using helper methods you can then choose when to show and close the toast notification. The reusable library also handles all animation for you.

We have built this sample toast notification into a helper library that you can download from our developer community. You are welcome to utilize this sample code to learn how you can write your own toast notification library. The source code for this sample can be found on our developer community forums.