Native OS notifications

Usage

Calling Notifications.ShowNotification will display a notification using your OS's notification manager.

On MacOS, you need to specify the BundleIdentifier and this needs to correspond to a defined identifier, otherwise no notification will be shown. Also, it must be specified whether the application is a console or GUI application, using SetGuiApplication, because if it is a GUI application and it is specified that it is a console application, the application would hang. For cross-platform compatibility, it's better to always do this. So, creating a notification will look like this:

Notifications.BundleIdentifier = "com.apple.finder";
Notifications.SetGuiApplication(true); // false for console application
Notifications.ShowNotification("notification-title");

Of course this works without flaws on Linux and MacOS, but not on Windows...
If the application exits right after the ShowNotification call, the notification will not be shown on Windows, because of the asynchronous nature of Toast notifications. So, either don't display a notification just before exiting or just put a tiny delay (1000ms should be plenty) after the ShowNotification call.

This library uses Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.Notifications to display notifications on Windows. This dependency is not shown in the NuGet package because referencing a Windows library statically from a cross-platform library is something I could not figure out how to do. So, the DLLs are included in the NuGet package for this library instead. If anyone has a better fix for this, let me know.

Install

In your .NET project, execute the following command:

dotnet add package OsNotifications 

Build from source

The best way to build this project is on MacOS, because of the Objective-C code needing to be compiled. Make sure you have clang installed and then just run the following commands in the OsNotifications folder (so the folder that contains OsNotifications.csproj):

dotnet build --configuration Release
dotnet pack --no-build --configuration Release

You will get a .nupkg file which you can import using NuGet. Probably, just running dotnet build or dotnet publish ... while referencing the project will not work properly. I'm not sure about it, but I recommend using the pack command.

It should be possible to build this on Linux as well, you just need to find the appropriate libraries to compile Objective-C with and then probably change the clang command in OsNotifications/OsNotifications.csproj to something more Linux-friendly.