Icon Question

[Drew]

When I browse my pocket PC device through the activesync "Explore"
button, I noticed that the .exe file of the program I developed is
displaying
a generic icon. (The icon does display correctly on the device, however)

Other programs display their icons correctly in the Windows Explorer.
For example, take a look at 'solitare.exe'

Why is this happening?

Do I need to embed another icon in the .exe?

The icon I'm using has two images embedded in it: one at 32x32 and one at
16x16.

Thanks,

Drew

 

[Peter Foot [MVP]]

ActiveSync can't extract exe icons remotely so it only displays generic
icons. However with the built in software there is a cludge which assigns
icons to certain files... See this registry key:-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows CE Services\SpecialNames

Note that for the effort involved its probably not worth setting this up for
your third party applications and am not aware of any software which does
use this.

Peter

 

[Drew]

Is there some reason why ActiveSync can't extract the icon?

Could this capability be added to a future version of ActiveSync?
(just for consistency)

Drew

 

[Peter Foot [MVP]]

It would require loading each exe as it was browsed, extracting the icon
resource, sending it across the connection to the pc and displaying it.
While this is a fairly quick process on the desktop (and icons are cached
once they've been read once) it would increase the network usage between pc
and device thus slowing down the browsing and not add a great deal of useful
functionality in return. With regular file types the icons used are those
associated on the PC, therefore its only exes which are a special case in
that they can each contain unique icons. Therefore if you are creating an
application which uses a certain file extension for data files it would be
beneficial to register this type on the desktop machine (even if you don't
supply a desktop viewer for the files).

Peter

--
Peter Foot
Windows Embedded MVP
OpenNETCF.org Senior Advisor
www.inthehand.com | www.opennetcf.org