I’ve recently been creating more desktop applications and I often needed to print out the system icons for standard files.  In the past I had used Photoshop to crop out the icons and I ended up only supportting a limited number of file icons.  And as I was writing this post I also found a shell32 tatic  used to create ImageLists in WinForms.

In order to load the system file icons and descriptions for my WPF applications, I built this Binding Converter.  The FileIconImageConverter.cs file is an IValueConverter that accepts  a filename or full file path.  The Converter supports caching and both 32-pixel and 16-pixel icons.  With the exception of the cache checking functionality, this converter has 4 main parts. First it creates a blank 0kb text file the the same extension as the source filename.  Second it loads a SHFILEINFO Struct using Win32.SHGetFileInfo and creates an Icon from the handle. Third it creates Bitmap from the Icon and saves it to a MemoryStream as a PNG.  Finally it loads the ImageSource using a PngBitmapDecoder from the previous Memory Stream.

I would love to give credit to Atul Gupta’s Blog, which help me out a lot with this.  I haven’t tried it in Silverlight, please let me know if you try it.  Please see my website for the full code.

http://www.bendewey.com/code/FilenameIconImageConverter.html

This little application, called the NativeFileTypeViewer (source code), loads a directory and converts the filenames into the filename descriptions and the file icon, to demonstrate the use of the binding converters.

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