Question

I need a method to create Icon Overlay’s for Folders and Files in Windows XP/Vista, using C# or C++? Any examples?

Thanks,
-Sean!

Answer 1

Tigris’ TortoiseSVN product heavily uses icon overlays provided by library shared by several Tortoise products, the overlays themselves are written in C++ rather than C#.

The documentation for the TortoiseOverlays project explains how they use it and the problems they have encountered (username: guest, empty password), and the GPL’ed sourcecode is in the Subversion repository (same username/password as above).

Snippit from documentation:

TortoiseOverlays registers itself with the explorer to handle the nine
states mentioned above, i.e. it registers nine overlay handlers. The
explorer process initializes the TortoiseOverlays handler, calling its
IShellIconOverlayIdentifier::GetOverlayInfo(). TortoiseOverlays looks
for the registered overlay handlers under
HKLM\Software\TortoiseOverlays\Statusname and calls their
GetOverlayInfo() method so they can initialize too (Note that any
change to the icon name, index, … your handler does are overwritten
later and won’t be used – it’s TortoiseOverlays that handles the icons
now). After the initialization, TortoiseOverlays relays every call to
its IShellIconOverlayIdentifier::IsMemberOf() method to the other
handlers. The first handler that returns S_OK determines whether the
icon is shown or not.