Huddled Masses

When was the last time that anyone used the icons that come with Visual Studio? I mean, even as temporary filler while doing a quick mock-up? Have you ever seen these things? Most of these icons were rejected by developers even in 1995, when they were originally created; today, when the operating system has capability for 48 × 48 pixel, 32bit, alpha-blended icons, these things are just a waste of space. I’d rather rip icons from Shell32.dll than use the ones provided by the geniuses behind Visual Studio’s packaging.

So, this is a public call to the Visual Studio development team: have some pride, refuse to ship those nasty, last-century icons. Tell management you want to pay a graphic artist to make a whole new package of high-quality icons that can actually be used in application development. There doesn’t have to be hundreds of these things, but it would be really nice if we could get a decent package of the standard icons we need for application toolbars — maybe you can borrow the artist from the Office team, they have a modern set of icons. Although, you should make sure you include multiple sizes of icons, because when my wife put’s her Outlook toolbars in large-icon mode, well, lets just say Office looses what little beauty it had.

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