So you just got done prototyping that new Winform or WPF application and the interface is a bit lacking. You are a programmer, not an artist after all. Well, never fear, free icons are here (wow that really rhymed). All kidding aside, most of us are not good at drawing images and icons, so we need some resources for these items.

Our journey starts with Visual Studio 2005. If you recall, it  had  a zip file called VS2005ImageLibrary located at Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\VS2005ImageLibrary\. This file contained a nice collection of icons, animations, buttons and a variety or other objects that you could use within your application. Here are the instructions on how and where to extract the images.

After installing Visual Studio 2008, I checked to see if this library was still available and was happily surprised to find it still located at Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033\VS2008ImageLibrary\.   Here you will find images taken from Microsoft programs such as Office and Vista, along with some cool animations for your progress displays.

Our next stop is online, where there are plenty of resources to find images. I ran across an excellent one the other day on Damen Guard's Blog. This collection, Silk Companion #1, looked to be over a 450+ top quality 16x16 icons in PNG format. These were mostly derived from a larger collection at FAMFAMFAM. Here you find over the original 1000+ icons that can be used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

I also stopped by Icon Factory, but their freeware icons and images were not licensed for redistribution and can only be use as desktop icons. Not much good for a us programmers.

My next step will be to start compiling a list of the best of the best graphical resources, targeted for us, the programmers. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free drop me a note.