Under Construction...
Icons are the small pictures that you see on the desktop or in Explorer representing files and programs. They are also the pictures that appear in the upper left corner of various program windows or on the left end of the buttons in the task bar representing running programs. Icons are basically just small bitmaps, but they include a special second bitmap which acts as a mask. The mask bitmap indicates which parts of the icon image are transparent.
You can create icons and include them in your programs. This can be useful for representing different object types graphically in the program, or simply to identify the program itself with a custom icon.
To create icons you use an icon editor (if anyone has any recommendations for an icon editor send me email) and save it as a .ico file.
Once you have an icon file you can include it in your resource scripts like this:
ICON_ID ICON "test.ico"
In this example ICON_ID is a preprocessor constant we defined elsewhere to be the icon's resource ID.