Icons in Solution Explorer (revisited)

I know that this was brought up once, and your answer was that the icons couldn't be changed through the VSIX installer, but that there was a "Dirty Hack" to do it. Has there been any progress on this?

It is only a cosmetic issue, but it is driving me nuts seeing that "VS2012" logo splattered across the screen everywhere!

We try to detect for this condition on load and update the registry with the file associations, but that relies on having permissions to do so - try running Visual Studio as an admin as you might be running into a permissions issue here.

As an aside we will be switching to an MSI based installer in the future though for the Pro version so this will allow us to directly update the registry on install rather than having to rely on the current mechanism.

Jeremy

Hrnm. I loaded up a project with .less files in admin mode and it still shows the same bland Visual Studio 2012 icon. Do I need to do some kind of reinstall as Admin to do it?

Hmm no. Sounds like perhaps there is already an association set up.

Can you open up regedit and browse to HKEYCURRENTUSER\Software\Classes\.less and check that the key exists and let me know what the value is?

The value should be Mindscape.WebWorkbenchLess.1

If that is the case can you browse to HKEYCURRENTUSER\Software\Classes\Mindscape.WebWorkbenchLess.1 and check that the key exists and if so then check the value of the DefaultIcon subkeys default value which will be a path pointing at a LessIcon.ico file. Check that the path and file exist.

If everything looks correct but the path for the .ico file is invalid then what may have happened is that an updated install of WW has switched the extension folder it was living in - generally you will see that these get installed under a randomly named folder in the VS extensions home - and it might be pointing to an out of date location.

Jeremy

It seems to be pointing to the right place, and it is a valid file. Is there anything else I can try?

Hmm, Sounds like they are being cached by VS already then, you could try deleting the VS icon cache files which are the toolbox*.tbd files under your VS user folder, see http://blog.hackingonhacks.com/2012/09/10/how-to-clear-the-visual-studio-image-cache/ for the specifics.

Remember to back things up before you go poking just in case :)

Jeremy

Really looking forward to this moving to a standalone installer....

Any ETA on that?

We will be switching this over with the next major update for WW and we are planning to have this out before the end of the year (so not too long!) but I dont have anything more specific than that at this stage. We will be putting out beta builds via the store prior to this being released though so hopefully that should happen within the next few weeks all going well :)

Jeremy

The caching issue solved it! Thank you!

I realize my vote means very little - but if you guys really are moving to a standalone installer for the future, I vote that you use the same icons used in the "Add New" dialog for the SASS, COFFEE, and LESS files - only smaller. The circles are better than the default, but those "Add New" icons look extremely professional and classy.

Hey, I hate to resurrect an old thread, but has there been any update to this in regards to the installer? I just did a reinstall of Windows 8 to upgrade to a Solid State Drive, and was about to reinstall Web Workbench, but if there is a new installer that will solve this Solution Explorer icons thing, I'd like to go that route before I use the VSIX one.

Nothing released yet but we are close to putting out this update so we will certainly be making noise about this once its ready to ship! :)

Jeremy