Black and white icons in Visual Studio 2012

Question

Typically, icon files (ico / bmp / ​​png) for controls in the Visual Studio Toolbox are built into the assembly as resource files. It seems that the System.Windows.Forms.dll file has icon files that are colored, and for VS2010 and below. Where does VS2012 download black and white white icons for toolbar controls?

Also, is there a guide to creating these icon sets for VS2012, since the icons should look good in both the light and dark VS2012 theme.

Thanks!

-Datte

Answer 1

It is not as simple as creating some icons for each color theme. The icons are actually built from glyphs and colors customized at runtime based on the theme. Take a look at the note in Visual Studio Dark Theme , where the team talks about thematic icons to understand what approach they took.

To quote an important detail:

All our Visual Studio 11 icons are saved in the repository icon as vector image files.

To answer the next question that you have, I'm not sure where the vector graphics are stored.

Answer 2

In my search for un-metro Visual Studio, I found that the main tool icons for HTML (MVC and Web Forms) and Win Forms are stored as raster resources in a number of unmanaged DLLs. WPF and others are stored mainly as PNG and ICO files in newer managed DLL files. Managed resources are a combination of directly embedded files as well as serialized bitmaps, PNGs, icons, image streams, and binary streams.

Look at these files for most of the toolbar images.

  \ Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0 \ Common7 \ IDE \ 1033 \ Microsoft.VisualStudio.Windows.FormsUI.dll
 \ Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0 \ Common7 \ Packages \ htmled.dll

Regarding color changes, it seems like Visual Studio is replacing white with black, and also changing the shades of white / gray to a darker counterpart, leaving the rest of the color alone. In past years, they included a leadership style document along with the SDK. I haven't found it in 2012 yet, and the MSDN link still points to a 2010 document.