I was translating some headers and came across commoncontrols.h which contained the interfaces IImageList and IImageList2 and decided to play with them. Increasingly Microsoft seems to be ignoring the flat API and so new functionality is found only in COM, Interop and .NET. A good example of this is image lists, there has really been no significant addition to flat API image lists for quite some time, however, a quick look at IImageList2 shows that Microsoft has been hard at work expanding and enhancing them. In order to take advantage of the new functionality you have to use COM, no way around it. Attached is an example of how to use an image list object. The commoncontrols.h header will be included in the next release of the headers but I have attached it here for now.
It is very important to read the note in the source file, it contains instructions for how to use imports from CC6.
Enjoy,
Edgar