Windows 10 / 8 start menu tile icon size for classic WPF desktop applications

Question

I'm actually wondering how you can control the icon size (or generally: which icon to use?) for a 'classic' WPF application appearing in the Windows 10 start menu as a tile shortcut.

I only found very few posts like this one on SO, but the only answer one gets is that the corresponding mechanisms are only implemented for 'modern' Windows apps. This may be true in terms of live tiles and manifest-based definitions.

However, there has to be a way of triggering 'bigger' icons. Specific example: I have built an WPF application that, when pinned to the start menu, only shows up with a small icon in it. This is the case for all 'classic' applications - see attached image of a shortcut to the 'Orca.exe' db editor. I do believe in a way to achieve bigger icons because I noticed the Mozilla Thunderbird application (which is a 'classical' application) shows up with this one (custom background color and big icon size).

Is there anyone who understands how to achieve this and may share his knowledge? I already extracted the used icons from executables/shortcuts and compared them, but both only provide standard icon sizes up to 256px, no difference there.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is actually pretty simple, but I remember having a hard time myself finding the documentation (or realizing that this is perfectly working for 'classic' applications):

Reference: MS docs - How to customize Start screen tiles for desktop apps

You can control the described behaviour and appearence of start menu tiles with a xml file called [Software].VisualElementsManifest.xml, where [Software] has to be replaced by the name of the .exe file (without extension), e.g. thunderbird.VisualElementsManifest.xml. As you already mentioned it, you can peek into the Thunderbird folder for a working example of it's content. Basically it looks like this:

<Application xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'>
  <VisualElements
    ShowNameOnSquare150x150Logo='on'
    Square150x150Logo='VisualElements\VisualElements_150.png'
    ForegroundText="dark"
    BackgroundColor="#FF0000"/>
</Application>

You can even provide additional options and assets for proper scaling, localization and accessibility by creating proper ressource files, documentation from MS has step by step instructions for this.

Note that the documentation warns about it's deprecated content. I don't know how long this work or if they are planning to completely remove this way of tile specification in the future, however it went perfectly fine on all version of W10 so far.

Note #2: If you're trying this out with an existing installation/shortcut, you have to refresh the modification timestamp of the corresponding shortcut and then unpin/pin the tile again, otherwise the shell won't notice the new definition file existance. Simplest way to do so in PS (run as admin when modifying shortcut in the system folder):

(ls "$env:ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\[ShortcutName].lnk").lastwritetime = get-date

or from CMD within the destination folder:

copy /b [ShortcutName].lnk +,,