Programatic desktop icon placement

Question

I am looking for a way to programatically get/set the icon positions on the desktop. Clearly there is some "state" stored in a somewhere. Does anybody know here?

I am trying to get a proof of concept going on ANY platform so if you know how to do it on XP in gnome, KDE or Mac OS I would really like to hear about it.

Answer 1

Start here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb773177(VS.85).aspx

It's unfortunately quite a nasty API because every object in the shell is identified by a thing called a PIDL, which was created by Satan himself to confuse anyone trying to avoid access violations and memory leaks.