Regarding the new Windows 10/11 Settings App -> Printers

Question

So, I noticed that when I click on my "Devices and Printers" option in the old Control Panel, it is now taking me to the new settings app. That is fine, it's cool, I actually like the new settings app, but I wonder if they forgot a detail, along the way?

The printers used to have really neat and fancy icons (images, in fact), and these were supplied by the driver supplier. Well. I know for a fact those images still exist and have not gone away, because I have written my own abstractions for these sorts of things.

To that end, it occurred to me that whoever is developing the Settings app, specifically the Printers portion, might not even be aware of the secret recipe for obtaining said fancy icon.

At any rate, for whomever wants to know, those are called staging images, in Win32 parlance, and they can be found, exactly at:

::{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}\::{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}\::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}\Provider%5CMicrosoft.Base.DevQueryObjects//DDO:%7B[ContainerId]%7D  

Where [ContainerId] is the device container ID returned from SetupDiGetDeviceProperty.

If you pass the above string to SHParseDisplayName(), you will get a PPIDL, and with that you can get the staging icon.

Does anyone know how to get ahold of any developers working in that part of the Windows Settings app to get feedback on this situation?

Here is a screenshot from an app that I wrote that uses my abstractions, and it shows the staging icon for one of my printers (this icon does not show up in the new Settings app)

Answer 1

Sure, you can use the feedback hub to make these suggestions.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/send-feedback-to-microsoft-with-the-feedback-hub-app-f59187f8-8739-22d6-ba93-f66612949332

--please don't forget to upvote and Accept as answer if the reply is helpful-

Answer 2

I submitted my feedback to the Feedback Hub, but I feel like I just got drowned out. But I completely understand, even if only a microscopic fraction of the world's population has any vested interest in Windows development, that's still potentially hundreds of thousands of software developers who want the ear of the dev teams at Microsoft.