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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I have to agree with you — those icons are embarrassingly bad… and what’s with the old Mac icon?
Hey some good news to raise the morale of the huddled masses – I took this back and found out the image library is updated in Whidbey Beta 2!
If the collection that will be shipped with VS.NET 2005 contains enough nice icons and are royalty free, then it would be a nice motivation for me to BUY VS 2005.
/crossfingers
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2005/01/23/359124.aspx
VS.Net 2005 has even fewer icon options than VS 2003. I have half a mind to reload VS 2003 on another machine just to steal the icons.
Yeah, there weren’t very many icons, once it shipped, I think I counted less than 120 icons … and several important ones missing … but there’s another 330+ available as bitmaps in 16color and 24bit color plus 23 little animations like the file-copy dialog uses, and they are all useable. There’s just nothing in Visual Studio 2003 that I would consider using in a Windows XP application.