It was only a few years ago that I was ranting about the lack of new icons included in Microsoft's developer tools. For example in August 2004, I wrote a blog post called Icon Frustration. In October I gave up and created My own darned icons. In January of 2005 I was elated about Soma's announcement that New Icons were to be Included in VS2005 and in June, I was able to finally see them even though they were a little tricky to find at first.

All was well and this hot button issue was no longer at the forefront of my mind. In fact, it became so mundane to me that I never once thought to look at the VS2008 goodies to see if there were new icons in this go round.

Until yesterday when they were mentioned by Ken Cox on a mailing list. I quickly went to unzip the VS2008 Icon package and poked around and was surprised to see a lot of beautiful new images. There is even a huge set of Common Elements png files that each have multiple images with the intent that we will snip the images for our own use.

There are also new Vista images such as these.

And there's a lot more!

So if you haven't seen them yet, I highly recommend unzipping them and perusing through the collection. They are typically installed at: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033\VS2008ImageLibrary.zip