Windows Explorer - Dynamic icons for duplicate file extensions

Question

For Visual Studio.sln files, Window Explorer does something “smart” to figure out whether to show v8 or v9 icons.

Now, when it comes to double-clicking / starting the icon, I know that it goes through the Visual Studio Launcher application, which looks at the version information in the sln file and selectively launches VS2005 or VS2008

But any idea how it makes part of the icon. Presumably, just looking at the folder, something opens the file in the background and decides which icon to use, but it's so easy / fast.

Any idea how to do this. We have a configuration generator here, which is being updated, deployed by ClickOnce, but it would be nice if people immediately saw which version of the generator application created the configuration files.

Greetings

Answer 1

I think this is what you are looking for?

How to create icon handlers

Answer 2

Take a look at this part of the tutorial on shell extensions on custom icons .