Creating long running Windows Forms applications without a start-up form
Sometimes you may wish to create an application that sits running in the background but doesn't actually display an initial user interface. However, the user can interact with the application and so therefore its not appropriate to be a service. Often such applications are accessible from a system tray icon. Another viable requirement might be for multiple top level windows, for example recent versions of Microsoft Word, where each document has its own application window. By default however, a normal Windows Form application displays the start-up form which definitely isn't desirable, especially as hiding this form isn't as straightforward as you might expect. Fortunately however, the framework provides us with the `ApplicationContext` class that can be used by `Application.Run`. This article describes how to use application contexts to create an application that initially has only a system tray icon to which further functionality can be accessed.
