How can I programmatically manipulate Windows desktop icon locations?

If I'm not mistaken the desktop is just a ListView, and you'll have to send the LVM_SETITEMPOSITION message to the handle of the desktop.

I googled a bit for some c# code and couldn't find a example, but I did found the following article. Torry: ...get/set the positions of desktop icons?. It's delphi code, but I find it very readable and with some P/Invokes you'll be able to translate it to c#.

The desktop is just a ListView control and you can get its handle and send messages to it to move icons around using LVM_SETITEMPOSITION.

Getting icon positions using LVMGETITEMPOS is a bit more complicated, though. You have to pass a pointer to a POINT structure as your LPARAM. If you try to do that, you will likely crash Explorer. The problem is you passed it a pointer in your address space, which the control interpreted as a pointer in Explorer's address space. Ouch!

The solution I've used is to inject a DLL into the Explorer process and send the message from there. Then you just have to have a way to get the position info back to your process.

I am still looking into this and will post the result once I finally get something working. I'm posting this because, thanks indirectly to Davy's post, I also found a classic VB implementation:

Shuffle Desktop Icons Using Interprocess Memory Communication

and that will probably be the basis for my code.