TrayLight

A lightweight Windows System Tray app that gives end users instant access to device info, IT support shortcuts, and Intune sync — branded for your organization and configured entirely through Group Policy / Intune.

Features

• System Tray icon with a modern Windows 11 Fluent Design popup
• Tray-icon hover tooltip — hovering the tray icon shows a compact device summary (computer name, IP address, last Intune sync, and any active warning count) without opening the full popup; localized like the rest of the UI
• Tray-icon state swap: shows a warning variant (Assets/app-warning.ico) whenever any info tile reports a real warning, otherwise the normal icon (Assets/app-normal.ico)
• Default info tiles (always shown, six in total):
  • Computer Name — click to copy
  • OS Version — informational
  • Last Reboot — uptime; warns when above the configured day limit
  • Storage Usage — system drive %; warns at the configured threshold
  • Serial Number — hardware serial via WMI (with VM detection); click to copy
  • Intune Sync — time since last MDM check-in; click to trigger a sync
• Additional tiles available via ADMX (not enabled by default):
  • Network Info — active SSID/Ethernet + IPv4. Adapter detection ignores virtual adapters (Hyper-V, VMware, VirtualBox, vEthernet, WSL, TAP/Npcap) and APIPA (169.254.x.x) addresses, preferring the physical Ethernet/Wi-Fi adapter that owns the default gateway, so the real device IP is shown even on machines running Hyper-V or VMware.
• Up to 6 configurable Quick Action shortcut buttons (URL / App / Command), each with its own title, subtitle, icon and position via ADMX
• Dynamic placeholders in shortcut actions — embed {{ComputerName}}, {{OsVersion}}, {{SerialNumber}}, {{IntuneSync}} and more; replaced with live device values at click-time (auto URL-encoded for mailto/https links)
• Customizable info text block under the Quick Actions — show office hours, helpdesk hotline, on-call info, etc. Tiny inline markup (*bold*, | line break, || blank line) configured via a single ADMX policy.
• Toast notifications for warnings raised by info tiles
• Multi-language UI — auto-detects the Windows display language; ships with English, German and French as runtime JSON files, and any other language can be added by dropping a JSON file into the Languages folder — no rebuild required (see Localization)
• Light / Dark theme follows the Windows system setting
• WPF with drop-shadow on Windows 11
• Welcome screen on first launch
• "Copy system info" button for helpdesk tickets
• Warnings only ever come from two scenarios: storage above threshold, or uptime above Behavior\RebootWarningDays. Everything else is purely informational — a fresh device produces zero warnings.

Configuration

TrayLight works out of the box with zero configuration — on a fresh device with no policy in place, it starts with sensible defaults ("IT Support" title, the #0078D4 accent color, and the six default tiles listed above). Customization is optional and pushed via Intune Settings Catalog (or Group Policy) using the bundled ADMX/ADML templates.

The MSI registers an HKLM Run key so TrayLight launches automatically on every user logon. Admins can disable this without uninstalling by setting Behavior\AutoStart = 0 in policy — the process then exits immediately on startup.

• Registry root: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\TrayLight\
• Templates: config/admx/TrayLight.admx and config/admx/en-US/TrayLight.adml
• Reference: config/admx/README.md

For the full Intune walkthrough see docs/INTUNE-DEPLOYMENT.md.

ADMX text doubles as a localization mechanism. Every visible string (tile titles, header/branding title, shortcut labels, footer and info text) can be overridden via policy, and those overrides always take precedence over the auto-detected UI language. So for a language that isn't built in, set the text in your language via Intune Settings Catalog — no code change required. See Localization for the full priority order.

Customer logo

The Branding\Logo policy accepts either a URL or a local file path:

• Option A — URL (easiest): set Logo = https://corp.example.com/logo.png via Intune. TrayLight downloads it to %ProgramData%\TrayLight\Cache\logo.png and refreshes once a day. If the download fails the previously cached copy is used.
• Option B — Bundled file (offline / airgapped): drop a logo.png into src/TrayLight/Assets/ before building the MSI; it ships inside the package and is installed to C:\Program Files\TrayLight\Assets\logo.png. Set Logo = C:\Program Files\TrayLight\Assets\logo.png in policy.

Hide the attribution line

Set Branding\HideAttribution = 1 to hide the "Powered by headsinthecloud.blog" line in the popup footer. When the policy is not configured or disabled (0), the line is shown (default). The attribution in the About dialog ("Created by headsinthecloud.blog") is not affected and always stays visible.

Tray icon visibility

After installation, the TrayLight icon may appear in the taskbar overflow area (the ^ arrow). To keep it permanently visible, drag the icon from the overflow onto the main taskbar. This is a one-time action per user — Windows remembers the preference. This is a Windows limitation that affects all system tray applications and cannot be controlled via policy.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• .NET 10 SDK (with the Windows Desktop workload)
• Windows 11 SDK 10.0.26100

Build & run

git clone https://github.com/daniel-fraubaum/TrayLight.git
cd TrayLight
dotnet restore TrayLight.sln
dotnet build   TrayLight.sln -c Debug
dotnet run --project src/TrayLight/TrayLight.csproj

Build the MSI locally

dotnet build src/TrayLight.Installer/TrayLight.Installer.wixproj -c Release
# → src/TrayLight.Installer/bin/x64/Release/TrayLight.msi

CI/CD on GitHub Actions builds the MSI automatically on every tagged release (v*) and attaches TrayLight-vX.Y.Z.msi to the GitHub Release.

Installation

The MSI is self-contained — it ships with its own .NET 10 runtime, so no .NET installation is required on the target machine. The package size is roughly 70 MB as a result.

• Manual (interactive): double-click TrayLight.msi to launch the setup wizard. The install directory defaults to C:\Program Files\TrayLight\. The final page offers a Launch TrayLight checkbox.
• Silent (e.g. for Intune / scripted rollout):

  msiexec /i TrayLight.msi /qn

• Uninstall:

  msiexec /x {2493D886-5C60-45E0-95BE-7F450BE2C2FC} /qn

Deployment

See docs/INTUNE-DEPLOYMENT.md for:

• Uploading the MSI to Intune as a Line-of-Business app
• Silent install / uninstall / detection rules
• Configuration via Intune Settings Catalog (ADMX import) — every tile exposes Enabled / Position / Title / Icon (notification badge configurable on Last Reboot and Storage Used only), plus six fully-configurable shortcut slots
• Classic on-prem Group Policy deployment (Central Store + GPSI for the MSI, Administrative Templates for configuration)
• Warning thresholds (StorageLimit, RebootWarningDays)

Localization

TrayLight supports multiple languages out of the box. On startup it auto-detects the Windows display language (via CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture) and shows all UI text — tile titles, status messages, menu items and dialogs — in the matching language. No manual language switch is required.

Translations are plain JSON files loaded at runtime from the Languages folder next to the executable (C:\Program Files\TrayLight\Languages\). There are no compiled .resx satellite assemblies, so a new language is just a file drop — no rebuild required.

Built-in languages:

Language	File	Status
English	en.json	Default / reference / fallback
German	de.json	Full
French	fr.json	Full

How resolution works

en.json is always loaded first as the base, then the file matching the Windows display language is overlaid on top. Any key missing from a translation therefore falls back to English automatically (never blank). The match order is:

1. Exact culture file — e.g. de-AT.json
2. Language file — e.g. de.json
3. English — en.json (the neutral base)

Regional variants resolve to their base language (e.g. de-AT → de.json, fr-CA → fr.json). If the Languages folder is missing or a file is corrupt, TrayLight falls back to an embedded copy of en.json, logs a warning and keeps running.

Three ways to get a language

1. Use a built-in language (EN / DE / FR). Nothing to do — the app picks the right one from the Windows display language.

2. Drop a custom JSON file — no rebuild needed. To add e.g. Dutch, copy en.json to nl.json, translate the values, place it in C:\Program Files\TrayLight\Languages\, and restart TrayLight. That's it. This is fully deployable at scale via a script or an Intune Win32 app (see INTUNE-DEPLOYMENT.md). Only keys you translate need to be present; anything omitted falls back to English.

Example nl.json (partial — untranslated keys fall back to English):

{
  "TileComputerName": "Computernaam",
  "TileNetwork": "Netwerk",
  "QuickActions": "Snelle acties",
  "MenuQuit": "Afsluiten"
}

3. Contribute a translation via PR. Add a new <language>.json under src/TrayLight/Languages/ (copy en.json, keep the keys, translate the values) and open a pull request so the language ships built-in for everyone. Use en.json as the complete reference key list.

Tip: ADMX policy values still override any localized string. If you only need to rename a few tiles/labels for one language, you can also set them via the Intune Settings Catalog (ADMX) without touching a JSON file — the policy value always wins.

Author

Created by headsinthecloud.blog - Daniel Fraubaum

• Blog: https://headsinthecloud.blog
• GitHub: https://github.com/daniel-fraubaum

License

Released under the MIT License.