An Icon is a bitmap image (.ico file) that is displayed in
the top left corner of a Window. Visual Studio designer allows you to create
your own icon images. To add an icon to a project, right click on the project
name in Solution Explorer. Right click will open Add Items menu. Select Add >> New Item.
Now on Installed Templates, select Icon File (see Figure 1) and
click Add. This action adds Icon1.ico file and opens the image editor.
Figure 1
In the image editor (see Figure 2), you design your icon the
way you like. There are two icon sizes available in the editor - 16x16 and
32x32.
Figure 2
The Icon attribute of Window is used to set Icon of a
window. Listing 1 sets Icon1.ico file as icon of Window.
<Window x:Class="WindowSample.MainWindow"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Title="WPF
Window Sample" Height="350" Width="525"
Name="FirstWindow" Icon="Icon1.ico"
>
Listing 1
The output with new icon looks like Figure 3.
Figure 3
The Icon property of Window class represents a window's icon
at run-time. This property takes an ImageSource variable.
The following code
snippet uses BitmapFrame.Create method to create an ImageSource and sets the Icon
property of a Window.
Uri
iconUri = new Uri("pack://application:,,,/Icon1.ico", UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute);
this.Icon
= BitmapFrame.Create(iconUri);
Summary
In this article, I demonstrated how to use Icon property of a Window to load an icon in a WPF application.