Each tool that is exposed through the Tool Palettes window requires an icon. Icons are typically 64 X 64 bitmap images. You can use the same icon for many tools, or you can create a unique image for each tool. Images can be loaded from local or network files, or from resource DLLs. The Tool Palette framework caches a copy of each tool's image in the current user's roamable profile location. Each tool's source image location is specified in the workspace catalog.
You also can provide multiple versions of a tool's image using various sizes, in which case the framework displays the version whose size best suits the current Tool Palettes window settings.
The AcTcImageList and AcTcImage classes provide services for loading bitmap resources from your application into a catalog item's definition at runtime. AcTcImage encapsulates an image, which can be in BMP, JPG, GIF or PNG format. AcTcImageList represents a catalog item's collection of images. You access an item's image list object by calling its GetImageList() function. Once you have a pointer to the image list, call the AcTcImageList::Add() function to append an image's information to the end of the list.