How can I load the same icon as used by MessageBox on Windows 10?

Question

On Windows 10 calling LoadIcon asking for the standard icon IDI_INFORMATION yields this icon:

On the other hand, calling MessageBox passing IDI_INFORMATION produces a dialog that uses this icon:

How can I obtain the second icon, if the obvious call to LoadIcon does not do so?

Answer 1

This feels like a bug in user32.dll but Windows 8 has the same issue so I guess Microsoft doesn't care.

You can get the flat icon used by MessageBox by calling SHGetStockIconInfo:

SHSTOCKICONINFO sii;
sii.cbSize = sizeof(sii);
if (SUCCEEDED(SHGetStockIconInfo(SIID_INFO, SHGSI_ICON|SHGSI_LARGEICON, &sii)))
{
    // Use sii.hIcon here...
    DestroyIcon(sii.hIcon);
}

SHGetStockIconInfo is the documented way to get icons used in the Windows UI on Vista and later. Most of the icons come from imageres.dll but you should not assume that this is the case...