The strangest thing happened a couple days ago: I opened Visual C# Express 2005, followed a link on the Start Page and learned something! I always thought the start page concept was silly, but I guess I've been proved wrong. (Nothing new there.)
The link escapes me now, but it linked to what was basically a twenty minute video proclaiming that new icons/images are included with Visual Studio 2005. Hooray!
There is a tiny downside, but it's worth mentioning: The bitmaps are BMPs and don't contain transparency information. This is bad since many are high color and have anti-aliased edges. This isn't a big deal, but the anti-aliasing is obvious when used on non-white backgrounds (you'll see it on selected menu items, for example). Let's hope they address this before RTM.
Thankfully, the bitmaps do use a consistent "transparent" background color. My brain has a hard time doing the transparent conversion, so I wrote a
little app to give it a hand:
Please note that the images are in the folder in the screen shot above, but are installed as a zip file. You'll need to unzip the zip to get to the goods.