How to extract visual studio project template icons?

Question

Visual Studio template has a parameter icon to display in create project dialog. It's described as

<VSTemplate Version="3.0.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/vstemplate/2005" Type="Project">
<TemplateData>
 <Name Package="{AAFFDC1E-A1C7-47bc-B3DC-9E685DF3959B}" ID="202" />
 <Description Package="{AAFFDC1E-A1C7-47bc-B3DC-9E685DF3959B}" ID="203" />
 <TemplateID>Microsoft.CSharp.ActivityDesignerLibrary</TemplateID>
 <Icon Package="{b3bae735-386c-4030-8329-ef48eeda4036}" ID="4600" />

So what mean

Package="{b3bae735-386c-4030-8329-ef48eeda4036}" ID="4600"

What is package and id ? How to create BitmapSource from it ?

Answer 1

For Visual Studio 2015, the CSharp project templates icons are located in ...\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\\VC#\\VCSPackages\\csproj.dll

For reference, the Visual Basic template icons are located in ...\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\\VB\\Bin\\msvbprj.dll

This is not comprehensive. For example, notice that the WPF package icons are not shown. I am Still reviewing. The icon ID 4600 is shown in the CSharp package, if this is the one you want.

Answer 2

I was looking for item template icons when I discovered this SO question.

The icon package guid is a registry key which will tell you where the icon file is located (it may also be embedded as a resource in the dll, per Marty's answer).

A quick way to find the one you want is to navigate to C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0 using windows explorer, then search for *.png.

Update: Turns out you can download the entire set of icons - Visual Studio Image Library (link to another SO answer).