implementation for Show me as "Away" when I am inactive for "x" minutes

Question

Hi Does anybody has any idea how to give implementation in c-sharp of the following feature of Yahoo or MSN: Show me as Away when I am inactive for 10 minutes. I have a chat client application developed in c-sharp. And now I want to give the same feature in my app too. Prompt reply will be appreciated. Regards Kamran

WebSnozz · Answer

Search Visual Studio help for: Timer.Stop Method With filtered by: Visual C# Once you believe the user is away start a timer with the amount of time that you want to wait until setting the away status. The code that displays the away status should subscribe to the Tick event of the timer. If you detect user activity before the timer fires the Tick event then call myTimer.Stop. Whenever you detect away status again then set myTimer.Enable = true to start it again. According to the example in the help files this resets the timer. Not sure if they mean starts the time from the start again. You may also have to call Start again play around with it. Detecting away status is another issue entirely. It depends on your idea of away. One way you could do it is to subscribe to a general event(see last paragraph) that is triggered anytime the user does something to your window click mouse move etc. What you would do here is actually have the timer I explained above always running but everytime you handle a user initiated event like a click then you rest the timer from the beginning. This means the only time the Timer Tick event will fire is when the user hasn't done anything for the timer specified amount of time. If you search Visual studio help with the C# filter: form.events then you should find the article titled Form Members in which there is a Public Events section that you can browse. You may have to subscribe the timer resting event handler to several different events to get the desired effect of resting the timer during any type of ser activaty. Make sure the optional search checkboxes are empty when you search the help files. MouseHover and Click are probably a good starting point. But my guess is your program will have the bahavior of going to away status if the user is using a different program and not using your program at all. This may or may not be what you hoped for. I'm not sure what kind of event will tell you if the mouse is active even when it is moving somewhere outside of your form.