Windows forms icons

Improve this question. Peter Mortensen Srivastava Srivastava 3, 10 10 gold badges 40 40 silver badges 72 72 bronze badges. Are you changing the property of the form, or the application? What icons are stored in your desktop? Make sure its in ico format. If you're looking for icons that are already in the correct format to use in your application, see the answers to this question: stackoverflow.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Javed Akram Javed Akram ComponentResourceManager typeof MyForm ; this. Icon resources. GetObject "statusnormal. Icon" ; or, by directly reading from your Resources: this. Csomotor Csomotor 2 2 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. This is the best answer among all. In VB. This should be the top answer. The only that keeps the icon in the exe file. I couldn't get any of the other answers to work. This answer is simple and direct and should be at the top!!!

This is the only thing that worked for me in a. NET 6. KristoferA KristoferA 12k 1 1 gold badge 38 38 silver badges 61 61 bronze badges. Once the icon is in a.

Javed Akram Josh Josh 61 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge. And when using the "Extra Large" font setting, the icon is rendered at 22x22 pixels. However, Windows uses the same 16x16x bitmap in your.

It does so by stretching the 16x16 version, which creates unsightly jaggedness in the stretched result. Shown below is the same Control Box icon, rendered once at 16x16 pixels, and then again at 18x18 pixels:. Notice the blocky appearance of the "" at 18x18 pixels, due to stretching the 16x16x bitmap. There isn't much you can do about this, because the final size will depend on the user's settings. The best you can do is to design bitmaps that use smooth color changes, and avoid a lot of high-contrast edges that will become blocky when stretched.

Notice how the final color of the blocks of transparent and inverse-video pixels depends on the title bar colors underneath the icon. More on that in the Transparency section below. Unless you set your Form object's ShowInTaskbar property to False, your application will have a button on the taskbar. That button's icon is exactly the same as the one used for the control box: the 16x16x version, potentially stretched to accomodate the user's font size, because font size affects the height of the taskbar.

If you add a NotifyIcon control to your application's Form object, then your application will display an icon in the tray area of the taskbar. The rendered size of the notify icon is the same as for the Control Box and Taskbar icons: 16x16 pixels, potentially stretched to accomodate the height of the system tray, which is dependent on the height of the Taskbar.

Oddly, however, Windows does not use the 16x16x bitmap for this circumstance; it uses the 32x32x bitmap by default, and squashes it down to the required size. I can think of no particularly good reason for this difference--using the 32x32 version for the notify icon, but 16x16 for taskbar and control box--but there it is. Notice that the text on my 32x32x icon is barely readable when shrunk down to 16x16 size.

The same will be true for any one-pixel-wide details you include in your 32x32x bitmap, unless you are very careful about where you put them. The reason for this is clear: a 16x16 bitmap has only one-quarter as many pixels as a 32x32 bitmap.

Consequently, three-quarters of the information in the 32x32 bitmap is thrown away when shrinking it down to 16x What to do about it is less clear. To get a more optimal appearance for your NotifyIcon, you need to know which pixels out of the 32x32 bitmap are the ones that will be displayed at 16x16 size. Fortunately, the mapping is straightforward. Windows throws out all the even-numbered rows and columns, and keeps what's left. Shown here at double-size is a 32x32x bitmap, where the black pixels are the ones that will be seen when the bitmap is shrunk down to 16x16 on a NotifyIcon, and the actual NotifyIcon image that this bitmap turns into in the system tray: Before The yellow has disappeared because the even-numbered rows and columns are thrown away.

Pixels in the even-numbered rows and columns are important for the appearance of desktop shortcut icons, but are irrelevant for NotifyIcon objects.

If your application's setup program or the user creates a desktop shortcut to your application, the results depend on whether the user's desktop is set to use normal-sized icons or large icons. For normal sized icons, Windows uses the 32x32x version. For large icons, it uses the 48x48x version. If you have not provided a 48x48 version, Windows will use the 32x32 version and stretch it up to 48x As with the Control Box and Taskbar icons, the results of stretching a bitmap are generally sort of ugly, so take the time to design a true 48x48x bitmap to be used for desktop shortcuts.

As you can see in the above two pictures, when rendering desktop shortcuts Windows draws a small arrow glyph on top of your icon, to indicate to the user that the icon is a shortcut to a file, and not a file itself. This glyph resides in the bottom left corner of the icon, covering an 11x11 pixel region for normal-sized icons, and a 16x16 pixel region for large-sized icons. At the size of 16x16 pixels and smaller, render icons straight-on front-facing.

For larger icons, use perspective. Use shadows to lift objects visually from the background, and to make 3D objects appear grounded, rather than awkwardly floating in space. Use an opacity range of percent for shadows. Sometimes a different level of shadow should be used, depending on the shape or color of an icon. Feather or shorten the shadow if necessary, to keep it from being cropped by the icon box size. These examples help demonstrate variations created based on the shape and position of the object itself.

The shadow sometimes needs to be feathered or shortened to keep it from being cropped by the icon box size. Although there is no specific color palette for standard icons, remember that they need to work well together in many contexts and themes.

Prefer the standard set of colors; don't re-color standard icons, such as warning icons, because this disrupts users' ability to interpret meaning. For more guidelines, see Color. Icon files require 8-bit and 4-bit palette versions as well, to support the default setting in a remote desktop.

These files can be created through a batch process, but they should be reviewed, as some will require retouching for better readability. Only a bit copy of the x pixel image should be included, and only the x pixel image should be compressed to keep the file size down. Several icon tools offer compression for Windows Vista.

The following tables show examples of scaling ratios applied to two common icon sizes. Note that not all of these sizes must be included in the. The code will scale larger ones down. As an icon gets smaller, transparency and some special details found in larger sizes should be sacrificed in order to simplify and get the point across. At 16x16, the icon for the portable audio device could easily be mistaken for a cell phone so the ear piece is a key visual detail to show.