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Language: VB4,VB5,VB6
Expertise: beginner

Sep 22, 2001

You can add a professional touch to your apps by showing an animated icon when the main form is minimized. To achieve this effect, prepare an array of Image controls, each one containing the icons that make up the animation, then add a Timer control, with the Enabled property set to True and the Interval property set to 250 (or any other value suited to the particular animation effected). Then add the following code:

Sub Timer1_Timer()
    Const NUM_ICONS = 4
    Static iconIndex As Integer

    If Form1.WindowState = vbMinimized Then
        Form1.Icon = Image1(iconIndex).Picture
        iconIndex = (iconIndex + 1) Mod NUM_ICONS
    End If
End Sub

It is important that all the images loaded into Image controls are ICO images; if you try to assign a standard BMP file to the Icon property a runtime error occurs.