When we first got our copy of the "CE Toolkit for VB 6.0" we were really disappointed: no application icons, no form icons, no user defined types, ...

Then we read the VBCE.COM article on "Adding an Icon to Your VBCE Application" page and, since then, we have been exploring a number of alternatives to solve those problems. 

Unfortunately"Windows CE 2.0 does not support the association of extensions with icon files". But what about Resource only (Icons) DLL's? It's indeed possible to use this option but leads us to another problem: how do we build such DLL's?

To solve this last question we built a regular VB6.0 application that can, in fact, build Icon-only DLL's for all WinCE platforms with a very small footprint. No other product is required: it performs as a compiler for this only purpose.

This program (VBCE Icons Tool) includes other options like easily managing the Icon files to include on the DLL, removing unused images from individual Icon files to reduce the footprint, calling an Icon Editor application and (!!!) customizing the output of the "Application Install Wizard" to assign a particular Icon to each and every VBCE application.

This last option can be done automatically without further knowledge of the process (changing extensions, registry settings, etc.). After running the tool, everything needed to install will still be left on the CD1 directory.

We also built a number of VBCE Test Programs with Modules that we consider vital to build any commercial application with VBCE, including:

• Fill a Form with an Image (.bmp)
• Registry calls that also includes clones of the regular VB6.0 registry functions. 
• How to assign an Icon to a VBCE application 
• How to assign an Icon to a VBCE Form - extracting Icons from the application default or from a DLL/EXE.
• How to insert an Icon on the System Tray of the WinCE device - includes animation and Click/DblClick functionality (as you know, to perform this we'll have to make a system call using structures; check how we solved this problem).

Our intention is to leave all the source code of the Test Programs available for free, expecting that some programmers will, in fact, be interested on the VBCE Icons Tool. However, some of these examples won't need any DLL at all.

The Evaluation Version of the VBCE Icons Tool performs exactly as the registered version BUT leaves all icon images over a grid with scrambled colors.