Great post, highly recommended read.

Not really. There are some solutions out there that copy only the .NET dlls you need and make them standalone...but at the end of the day, for a reasonable WinForms or WPF app, you're downloading several MB worth of dlls. Combine that with the fact that by doing this you lose automatic security or performance upgrades per .NET service packs, and the effort just isn't worth it.

Why bother when .NET is installed by default on the latest OSes? Vista ships with .NET 3 installed.

This isn't extracting icons from files. This is getting the icon of the program associated with a file's extension. E.g. foo.pdf will return the Adobe icon.

The technique is nothing special, just the Icon.ExtractAssociatedIcon method of the framework.

I've tagged this article appropriately.

Wow, great series of articles.

Seeing is believing...I'm not an high-horse techno zealot anti-MS Slashdot reader, but I'm skeptical of this nonetheless. We'll see if it's followed up by actions.

Heheh, ditto to what powerrush said. :)

Well deserved, Scott.

Interesting article, thanks.

I like Consolas, hate the color scheme. Tagged appropriately. ;-)

Why the option is hidden? Probably because most average users won't use it! This is more a geek feature than anything. It makes sense that it's available only via a keyboard shortcut.

There's also one on CodePlex that works on .NET and Mono: http://www.codeplex.com/ConsoleFx

mcgurk said it all, and very well said might I add.

Exactly. Avoid using language keywords as member names.

Excellent post, Justin.

I highly recommend this toolkit. It's free, Phil fixes bugs promptly, and frankly the controls themselves are far more powerful and customizable than most of the commercial components I've used. Big thumbs up.

The author doesn't actually claim extension methods suck, but merely they can falsely believe they exist on the actual type. [duh]

Thus, I've tagged the story appropriately. Sorry Justin! ;-)