One thing that can often be underestimated when developing applications is the overall impact that a consistent set of decent icons can have. Using mis-matched icons that have been sourced from a number of different places can really make an otherwise professional looking application look far less professional.
If you or your company cannot afford to or will not for any other reason buy a set of custom icons, all is not lost. Visual Studio has long since offered sets of professional icons in a number of different formats, that we can utilize in our applications free of charge. These are the actual icons that are used in Visual Studio, Office and other Microsoft applications, so many users will already be familiar with them.
In older versions of Visual Studio, such as the 2010, or even 2008 versions, the provided image libraries were installed with the application and could be found at one of the following paths:
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\VS2010ImageLibrary\1033
Note that on a 64 bit machine, this path would change to the following:
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\VS2010ImageLibrary\1033
However, Microsoft changed how the image libraries could be accessed in newer versions of Visual Studio, from the 2012 version onwards. In these later versions, the image libraries were no longer included in the installation of Visual Studio. Instead, we have to search for Visual Studio Image Library and manually download them from the Microsoft website.
The newer icon sets also contain searchable Adobe Reader files that list the contents of the icon sets and provide links to the relevant folders of each of the icons. Most of the icons are also included in multiple sizes and so the newer libraries are much larger than the previous ones.
A few examples of the 2010 icons can be seen in the following image:
The following image shows the same icons, but in the flat style introduced in 2015:
The following image shows how the flat style icons changed in 2017, for comparison:
Note that no image library was made available with Visual Studio 2019, so maybe this is a sign of things to come. However, the current collections of icons will cover most purposes.