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How To Create an Icon for Visual Studio with just MSPaint and Visual Studio


I have been reading a lot of posts about creating icons and then assigning one of those icons in Visual Studio Project --> Properties --> Icon and Manifest. When I do this, I get a message that the icon is not valid. The primary way I have been doing this is using MSPaint.

This is when I save a 24-bit icon in MSPaint, which is mentioned in one of the posts I read. I cannot find any editing ability in the image editor of Visual Studio 2012. So, how does one create a simple icon for an application?

I know there are free converters out there. I am asking specifically if there is a way to convert using existing tools like Visual Studio, MSPaint, and so on.


Solution

  • When this question was posted in 2016, it made more sense to use only MSPaint and VS. But nowadays, you can just use https://icoconverter.com/

    1. Upload your image file (PNG, GIF, JPG, etc.)
    2. Select the desired resolutions.
    3. Download the ICO file, which contains various resolutions of your original image.