Scenario

You are running a Windows Forms application that runs as a System Tray. You have a few notifications that you would like to show the user.

However, what good is notifications, if the user is on the Loo? She will not see them.

Solution

Run a timer that detects when the user is active on the machine, and then show the notification or other task you would like to provide.

Below is the sample code that will do this for you. Of course for your production environment you would use a timer of some sort or event subscription service.

I have tested this by using other applications whilst the program monitors my input and it is safe to say it works across all my applications, even when the screen is locked.

So you might want to deal with an issue where the screen is locked but the user is moving the mouse. However such an issue is an edge case that is unlikely to happen.

I know the MSDN mentions that GetLastInputInfo is not system wide, however on my Windows 10 machine, it does seem to be the case that it is system wide.

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Timers;

namespace MyMonitor
{
    class Program
    {
        private static Timer _userActivityTimer;
        static void Main()
        {
            _userActivityTimer = new Timer(500);
            _userActivityTimer.Elapsed += OnTimerElapsed;
            _userActivityTimer.AutoReset = true;
            _userActivityTimer.Enabled = true;
            Console.WriteLine("Press the Enter key to exit the program at any time... ");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        private static void OnTimerElapsed(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e)
        {
            Console.WriteLine($"Last Input: {LastInput.ToShortTimeString()}");
            Console.WriteLine($"Idle for: {IdleTime.Seconds} Seconds");
        }

        [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = false)]
        private static extern bool GetLastInputInfo(ref Lastinputinfo plii);
        private static readonly DateTime SystemStartup = DateTime.Now.AddMilliseconds(-Environment.TickCount);

        [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
        private struct Lastinputinfo
        {
            public uint cbSize;
            public readonly int dwTime;
        }

        public static DateTime LastInput => SystemStartup.AddMilliseconds(LastInputTicks);

        public static TimeSpan IdleTime => DateTime.Now.Subtract(LastInput);

        private static int LastInputTicks
        {
            get
            {
                var lii = new Lastinputinfo {cbSize = (uint) Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(Lastinputinfo))};
                GetLastInputInfo(ref lii);
                return lii.dwTime;
            }
        }
    }
}

If you want to ensure a windows form cannot be dragged out of the view-able area of a multiple monitor screen and also want the option to dock it to the monitor it was actively on, then this code might be helpful. It also has a tolerance level of 50% where 50% of the form can be out of the view-able area.

You might think you do not need to enumerate the screens, but you do, if you want to dock it, especially if some screens are portrait and others are landscape.

You can optimize the code by storing the LeftMost and RightMost screen in a global static location.

 private void DockFormIfOutOfViewableArea()
        {
            var widthTolerance = Location.X + (Width / 2);
            var heightTolerance = Location.Y + (Height / 2);
            Screen.AllScreens.OrderBy(r => r.WorkingArea.X).ForEach(screen =>
            {
                if (!IsOnThisScreen(screen)) return;

                if (heightTolerance > screen.WorkingArea.Height)
                    Location = new Point(screen.WorkingArea.X, screen.Bounds.Height - Height + screen.Bounds.Y);
                if (Location.Y < screen.WorkingArea.Y )
                    Location = new Point(screen.WorkingArea.X, screen.WorkingArea.Y);
            });

            if (widthTolerance > SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Right)
            {
                var closestScreen = Screen.AllScreens.OrderBy(r => r.WorkingArea.X).Last();
                Location = new Point(closestScreen.Bounds.Right - Width, closestScreen.Bounds.Height - Height + closestScreen.Bounds.Y);
            }

            if (widthTolerance < SystemInformation.VirtualScreen.Left)
            {
                var closestScreen = Screen.AllScreens.OrderBy(r => r.WorkingArea.X).First();
                Location = new Point(closestScreen.Bounds.Left, closestScreen.Bounds.Height - Height + closestScreen.Bounds.Y);
            }
        }

Download

When dealing with JSON data, and you dealing with large result sets, say larger than a 1MB or so, it will definitely be feasible in many situation to zip the data before sending it to your client application.

The first step is to add zipping to the pipeline that Nancy uses, we then check that the content type returned in the response is JSON and we check that the client can accept the encoding of GZIP.

public static void AddGZip(IPipelines pipelines)
        {
            pipelines.AfterRequest += ctx =>
            {
                if ((!ctx.Response.ContentType.Contains("application/json")) || !ctx.Request.Headers.AcceptEncoding.Any(
               x => x.Contains("gzip"))) return;
                var jsonData = new MemoryStream();

                ctx.Response.Contents.Invoke(jsonData);
                jsonData.Position = 0;
                if (jsonData.Length < 4096)
                {
                    ctx.Response.Contents = s =>
                    {
                        jsonData.CopyTo(s);
                        s.Flush();
                    };
                }
                else
                {
                    ctx.Response.Headers["Content-Encoding"] = "gzip";
                    ctx.Response.Contents = s =>
                    {
                        var gzip = new GZipStream(s, CompressionMode.Compress, true);
                        jsonData.CopyTo(gzip);
                        gzip.Close();
                    };
                }
            };
        }

Perfect, now what we want to do is also, is in the CLIENT application calling the rest service, we need to add a header to the request so the server knows is supports GZIP:
Accept-Encoding: gzip

So, we add this code to the client.

Request sent by client.

protected WebRequest AddHeaders(WebRequest request)
        {
            request.Headers.Add("Accept-Encoding", "gzip");
            return request;
        }

Response processed by client.

if (((HttpWebResponse)response).ContentEncoding == "gzip"
                    && response.ContentType.Contains("application/json"))
                {
                    var gzip = new GZipStream(response.GetResponseStream(), CompressionMode.Decompress, true);
                    var readerUnzipped = new StreamReader(gzip);
                    Response = Deserialize(readerUnzipped);
                }
                else
                {
                   Response = Deserialize(reader);
                }

Implement whatever deserializer you want, and then make sure you close the stream, reader.close 😉