Version 1.5 Of The Visual Studio Icon Patcher Is Now Available

I’m happy to announce that the next release of the Visual Studio Icon Patcher is now available on CodePlex.

What’s Changed

The biggest fix in this release is proper support for non US English installations. You should now be able to download the application, or code, and use it as-is no matter what language Windows is set to or how many language packs you have installed. If for some reason you do run into an issue feel free to contact me through CodePlex or on here.

Along with proper culture support there are now 181 new images included in the patching process. This brings us up to a total of 189. The new areas that are included are the Document Outline (CSS & HTML), Toolbox (HTML/MVC, Web Forms, and Win Forms), and numerous toolbar & menu icons. There are also some areas around debugging and TFS that are included though I’m not entirely sure what changed since I don’t use TFS.

This release brings one breaking change which is you are no longer able to extract icons from Visual Studio 2012 or inject icons into Visual Studio 2010. Once the complexity of the patching process grew it became easier to make this a one way process. Plus I doubt anyone really wants to make anything look like Visual Studio 2012. If for some reason you really do want to do this it shouldn’t take too much to modify the code to let you, but with each release it will become more and more complex to do so.

What’s Next

From here it looks like the next thing to work on is including the managed resources which should help fill in the spots that are currently being missed, and a way to allow dark themes to work with the patched icons. More news to come about that soon. Going forward I’ll be using the Issue Tracker to prioritize what gets done next.

It’s been nice seeing people enjoying what first started as a simple script in LINQPad one night. I’ve now seen this project mentioned on Stack Overflow (admittedly that was me), CodeProject, numerous blogs, Twitter, the Visual Studio UserVoice page, and most importantly Scott Hanselman’s blog. I left that one for last because it wasn’t until he mentioned this project did the interest in it really pick up. Thank you to Scott and everyone that’s helped spread the word.