Exposing common button icons on .NET windows forms

 e.g  New icon, Save, Copy , Paste

Unfortunately the feature to ‘insert standard items’ was only introduced in VS2005 upwards and I needed to use VS2003 for .NET 1.1. Fortunately there’s a very simple solution to this.

Open up VS2005, create a windows form project, Insert a tool strip and select ‘insert standard items’ from the tool strip task menu.

Switch to the code behind view. In the constructor access each tool strip button icon you wish to use.

Next simply save the icons as a bitmap to disk.

this.newToolStripButton.Image.Save(@"C:\Icons\new.bmp");
this.openToolStripButton.Image.Save(@"C:\Icons\open.bmp");
this.saveToolStripButton.Image.Save(@"C:\Icons\save.bmp");

 The bitmaps are now suitable to be imported as an button image in a .NET 1.1 project on VS2003.