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From: bcw@rti.rti.org (Bruce Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: MicroEmacs for Windows (Suggestions)
Summary: Icons for DOS applications
Message-ID: <1991Mar23.013227.15223@rti.rti.org>
Date: 23 Mar 91 01:32:27 GMT
References: <2571@odin.cs.hw.ac.uk> <1991Mar20.231011.32273@ccad.uiowa.edu> <1991Mar22.183539.26218@sj.ate.slb.com>
Organization: Research Triangle Institute, RTP, NC
Lines: 47

In article <1991Mar22.183539.26218@sj.ate.slb.com>, poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger) writes:
> [...] What you
> describe will ONLY change the icon as it appears in the MDI of program
> manager. Once you actually launch (run) the program, then minimize it, it ONLY
> displays the icon that was bound to the .EXE file by the resource compiler. In
> fact, the application must register the icon before it will display, and
> the application itself may even draw its own icon. The clock program supplied
> by uSoft is an example of a program that dynamically draws its own icon.
> 
> This is why a DOS application can only get that ugly DOS icon. There is no way
> to bind an icon to the DOS application like the resource compiler (comes with
> SDK) can to a TRUE windows application. Windows supplies the DOS icon
> internally and you can't change it.

It wouldn't have been all that hard for Microsoft to have the DOS box
accept an icon that it would supply in place of the DOS icon when the
window was minimized.  As Russ notes, it isn't difficult for an 
application to use any of several icons - or even to generate icons 
on the fly - so this really shouldn't cause any serious technical
problems.  I suspect that the reason that they didn't was either
a) not enough time to implement it along with everything else that
was going into Windows or b) they didn't think of it in time for it
to make it into the new version of Windows.  Even though Windows has
been able to run DOS apps for a long time, the earlier versions of
Windows would run only a few _very_ well-behaved and _very_ small 
apps (read: not very much commercial software) so it's probably been
only with Windows 3.0 that very many people have tried to run multiple
DOS programs at the same time.

BUT!!  This would require a code change in the DOS box code inside
Windows, to load and remember the appropriate icon for the DOS app,
and to display it rather than the DOS icon.  Without that change, 
the DOS box just displays its class icon (the infamous DOS icon)
whenever it's minimized.  I'm quite aware that there would be some
issues about how you specify an icon for a DOS program and so forth
(most likely through some mechanism in PIFEDIT), but these are really 
relatively minor problems compared to all the other things Windows 
does.  There's no way for ordinary users to do this type of thing - 
it's a programming issue that would be best addressed in the basic 
code for Windows:  grafting it on after the fact would be less 
convenient for the user and harder to program than doing it right 
in the basic OS.

In other words, this is a job for Microsoft.  Microsoft, are you
listening???

						Bruce C. Wright