Question

I’m planning on building a hotkey-activated application launcher for Windows. I intend for it to be a pop-up grid of icons in which you can then click and launch what you need. I’d like for it to automatically scan the Start Menu and Desktop for program shortcuts and catalog them. However, I’m not sure of how to go about the icon retrieval process from the shortcuts/actual binaries and I was wondering if there are any libraries for C/C++ that handle this sort of thing? If not, how would I go about it otherwise?

Answer 1

I think you want to use ExtractAssociatedIcon

See
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms648067%28v=VS.85%29.aspx