Does Visual Studio or MSDN provides a default set of icons for desktop applications, i.e. icons for common actions, GUI elements, data types, etc?
For instance, I have a
For Visual Studio 2012 and 2013:
The icons are not in the program folder any more.
You can download the Visual Studio Image Library which contains most of the icons at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35825
It contains many icons from Visual Studio, Office,...
check out http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/ very nice and exhaustive icon sets. as far as I can tell they are free.
There is an image library packaged with Visual Studio. Do a search for icon files in the Visual Studio install directory to reveal its location. It may or may not be there, or will be in different locations, depending on the version of VS you have installed.
If memory serves the Express editions come without this feature, but all other versions since at least Visual Studio .NET do.
You should be able to find the icons in a zip file named "VS2008ImageLibrary.zip" located here:
%Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033