Extract Icons from .EXE's and .DLL's

Extract all icons from an .Exe or .Dll file to a PictureBox control, or any other control with a device context handle (.hdc) property. Better yet, draw them to a control without an .hdc property such as an ImageList. This is useful when creating toolbars where you need to dynamically add icons at run time. I'll show you how to do that as well! The key API calls used are the DrawIconEx and ExtractIconEx functions.

Download Source Code

This program uses the VB6 version of the Microsoft Windows Common Controls and Microsoft Common Dialog Control and will not work under VB5. You can download the program and open the files with Wordpad or Notepad to view the source code.

Background:

This program relies on the ExtractIconEx and DrawIconEx API functions. Drawing an icon in a PictureBox is easy since it has the device context handle property required by the DrawIconEx function. The ImageList control, however, does not have an .hdc property meaning we cannot draw directly to it.

Also shown is how to dynamically populate a ToolBar control at runtime. I admit, this is a primitive example. See some of my other toolbar projects for more detailed examples.

Process:

The form load event initializes the ToolBar and PictureBox controls. What is important here is the size of the PictureBoxes. They must match the size of the embedded icons for the resultant images to come out right.

Clicking the Browse button clears all Toolbar buttons and removes the ties between the Toolbars and ImageLists by setting the Toolbars' ImageList properties to Nothing. Once these controls are unbound, the ImageList images are cleared and the image size properties set. Again, the size must match that of the embedded icons. An Open dialog is displayed to let you select the .exe or .dll to retrieve the icon from.

Once a file is opened the number of icons in the file is determined by calling ExtractIconEx with the nIconIndex parameter set to -1. To draw the first icon, ExtractIconEx is called again. This time nIconIndex is set to the index of the icon to extract, phiconLarge and phiconSmall are pointers to arrays of handles of large and small icons respectively and nIcons is the number of icons to extract. Onto the PictureBoxes. A simple call to DrawIconEx draws the icon provided the PictureBox's AutoReDraw property is True.

Now the icons are added to the ImageLists using the ListImages.Add method. The secret here is to use the Image property of the PictureBox. Finally the ImageList is bound to the Toolbar and a button is added via the button object. Setting the Key field of the ImageList and the Toolbar controls to the same value tell the ToolBar what image to display for the new button.

Scrolling through the other icons is just more of the same. Simple, isn't it?

Download the source code and press F5 to run the program. Click the Browse button to display the Open a dialog box. Point to any executable or dll file and open it. The First icon will be displayed and added to the two toolbar controls. Both small (16x16) and large icons (32x32) are extracted.

If there is more than one icon present, the Next button will be enabled. Click it to scroll through the rest of the embedded icons. As you will see, the small and large icons may be very different.