ReplaceVistaIcon

Today, I want to talk about another tool which is not written by me: ReplaceVistaIcon (aka SetVistaIcon). This is a small windows command line tool which sets or replaces native icons in windows executables.

My usage scenario is mainly connected to my work with .Net applications:

Nowadays I mostly write my smaller utility programs in C#. Simply because it is simple. Often I also define my own file types together with the utilities. So far so good. The problem arises when I want to give these file types dedicated icons, and when I want to place these icons inside my application (I do not like small utility applications, which consist of a thousand files). .Net application also contain a native Win32 resource section. It, however, is usually automatically generated by Visual Studio. If you want to add further native resources, that generation is no longer a viable option.

The normal way around this problem is to provide the complete native resource section manually. This, however, is tiresome because you lose many nice features, like the automatically generated application manifest and the generated version information section.

That is why I use ReplaceVistaIcon after successful compilation (post build event) to add further Icons to my applications.