A customer reported that their code to manipulate the position of icons on their desktop stopped working. It had worked “just fine” until the 19H1 update. The escalation engineer debugged the program and discovered that what it does is that it looks for its icons on the desktop and repositions them by hunting for the ListView control that holds the desktop icons, and then sending it a LVM_. They claim that this stopped working, and they want to know why.
It stopped working because it never was guaranteed to work in the first place.
Starting in Windows 10 version 1809, there were changes to the way that the positions of the desktop icons are managed, and one of the consequences is that if you try to manipulate the icon positions by talking directly to the ListView control, those changes aren’t taken into account by the icon management code, and your changes are lost.
The solution is to stop sending messages to an undocumented window to take advantage of internal implementation details, because the nature of implementation details is that they change when the implementation changes.
The supported API for manipulating desktop icons is IFolderView::, and that API still works. (As it should, because it’s the supported API.) You can look at some code I wrote many years ago for manipulating the position of desktop icons to see how it’s done.
I view this as a failing of the windows documentation more than anything. I correctly predicted that attempting to google this task would return 2 things, depending on the exactly search terms:
1. Your original blog post, which while very helpful, but doesn't always show up first, and isn't exactly official documentation. If I wasn't familiar with your blog it wouldn't stand out.
2. A StackOverflow post asking this exactly question, being answered with the exact...
Try searching for “win32 shell namespace” and then take the link for “Introduction to the Shell Namespace”.
I'm not really looking for help, it's not a task I'm currently needing to solve. I'm critiquing the documentation, which isn't structured in a way that allows for useful problem solving or searching. (My major evidence is that the StackOverflow page is still the top result for many variations on this search).
Funnily enough, while I didn't find that page, I found a word for word identical page (aside from the title) called "Common Explorer Concepts"...
I agree a lot of the documentation is just plain terrible. It use to be much better back before the “everything has to only be on the internet” craze took over.
It’s hard for me to relate with people who obsess about the desktop because if you use your computer for serious work then you won’t see your desktop for years at a time and you may forget what the wallpaper even looks like.
I agree. I last set my desktop wallpaper on my old Win7 laptop some years ago. I've been on Win10 since that time and I haven't changed the default wallpaper. I almost never see it, other than on the login screen. Fussing about the desktop icons (and going about it in an undocumented manner, no less) seems like a pointless waste of time.
I'm not narrow-minded to think that everyone uses their...
Dear Mr Chen:
There is a question about set-parent function irrelevant to this subject.
My team want to use Set-Parent to create a parent/child relationship between windows which belong to different processes, we build a Demo Project, but the process included crash occasionally. Thus i look for the reason, i find your article named "Is it legal...