StrataFrame Forum

Standard Menu Icons?

http://forum.strataframe.net/Topic15479.aspx

By Edhy Rijo - 4/9/2008

Hi,

I noticed that the ThemeMenuStrip has some standard menu icons for items like New, Open, Save, etc.  Where are those icons coming from?

Is there any VS resource file that will allow me to use any of those menu icons in my application?
By Trent L. Taylor - 4/9/2008

Yes, those icons are coming from the standard resource collections within VS.  You can ultimately get to all of their ions, but not necessarily at run-time. 

I recommend using an icon collection such as IconExperience (www.iconexperence.com ), Icon Shock (www.iconshock.com), or VirtualLNK (my favorite) www.virtuallnk.com .  You will be far less frustrated and have much more control. 

By Edhy Rijo - 4/10/2008

Trent L. Taylor (04/09/2008)
Yes, those icons are coming from the standard resource collections within VS.  You can ultimately get to all of their icons, but not necessarily at run-time. 

 

Thanks Trent.

Can you point me to the direction to access the standard resource collection in VS?  I know this is not an SF issue, but I have look in the VS help and not been able to find anything about it.

I have some icons I still use in my VFP project, but those just don't look good in .NET project.  I have seen those collections you recommended and they looks pretty good, so it is time to make a decision about them Tongue.

By Trent L. Taylor - 4/10/2008

Honestly I can't tell you exactly where they are stored.  I never actually use them, but they will be an embedded resource so they will be very difficult to get to.  They are not stored on disk as an ICO, BMP, or PNG.  So you will have to find the VS resource that contains them (they are kindof all over the place), and pull from that assembly.  It is not going to be something that you can distribute. 

When you click the Insert Standard Items on a menu strip, it pulls from those resources and then embeds the bitmap in the image property of the menu item.  So at that point those images are not going to be pulling from the VS resource any longer, but the resource of the menu strip item.

So getting to these resources is possible, but I can tell you that you will have some work cut out for you.  You would really need to write a program that extracts the embedded resources from the VS assemblies and saves them to disk as a BMP or PNG.  Then you could turn around and use them...but you would be money ahead to just buy an icon collection....I could barely function without ours!