More of a couple of coments than a question...

Found the tooltip part, was right in front of me so nevermind that.

I sure would like to be able to specify thumbnail sizes anywhere between the 96px and 256px range.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the suggestion on file extensions, we will write that down.  As for the thumbnail sizes you mentioned, do you mean you wish to be able to programmatically retrieve a thumbnail image between that size range for use elsewhere?  Can you give more detail on the intention there so we understand what you want to do with the result?

I have a limited area to work in and have an older implementation of the shell that like you mentioned in a blog, it is based in part on COM. Not the best scenario.  I have a listview that extracts the Shell Thumbnail and allows the user to set the thumbnails to a specific size via a slider.

lstview.ThumbnailSize = New Size(128,128)

As far as obtaining just the thumbnail, I see that has already being implemented. It might be handly for some users as a separate control linked to the navigation controls that I believe was also implemented in the old ShellPac from MS.

The idea of setting speciifc sizes is a good one and does follow the OS shell. In my situation, I need it to be a bit more flexible when a user has it set to view Thumbnails. 

Hi Steve,

Our implementation of the shell object framework is also COM-based on the inside, but we wrap all that up so you don't need to worry about it.  The UI in our Shell product is completely 100% WPF, making it easily customizable and themeable.  

Our shell objects have three properties that let you get varying sizes of thumbnails.  You can get 48x48, 96x96, or 256x256 sized thumbnails.  While we don't have a way at this time for you to get an arbitrary specified size, you can always get the next size up from one of those and downscale it.  The nice thing about the fixed sizes is that they get cached (for fast retrieval again later) during the lifetime of the related shell object.  Whereas if we added a method to get an arbitrary thumbnail size, that result would not get cached.  Will what we have work for your needs or would you still like to request a way to call a method and get an arbitrary-sized thumbnail?

You can see in this blog post the various layout modes that are available in the ShellListView control.  They match the appearance of the related layout modes in Windows Explorer.

I can't say that the current implementation can't be used, but it does limit my use of it. My current solution allows it, and I can't replace it with one that limits it a bit. The only problem I have with my current solution is, it can't be skinned with themes like WPF and it is problematic in some container controls. I've worked around those limitations pretty well, but I would like to have my cake and eat too :)

Hi Steve,

We can add a method that will load an arbitrary-sized thumbnail.  A couple notes though... 

1) It might not get returned in the same call, since some thumbnails that aren't already cached get async loaded later but returned in the same dispatcher thread.  We're thinking you could pass in an Action<ImageSource> to the LoadThumbnail method.  That action would get called if an image is loaded and would be passed the image.  Would that be ok?

2) Not all shell objects return thumbnails.  Should the LoadThumbnail method pass an icon to the action if a thumbnail can't be found?  Or should that be a boolean option?