If you're creating toolbars and menus for Visual Studio, the only way to get a crisp icon for the item is to use a 32-bit bitmap, which is a 24-bit bitmap plus an 8-bit alpha channel. Unlike lower bit levels, 32-bit bitmaps support transparency which prevent your icons from looking like a box. Worse still, I discovered that using 24-bit bitmaps creates artifacts in the form of little black dots when rendered.

Unfortunately, unless you have a license to Photoshop, you may discover that none of your tools create 32-bit bitmaps. I don't have a Photoshop license at work so I use Paint.NET to do my graphical work (which is great in most of my scenarios). Here's what the Paint.NET author had to say about why 32-bit bitmaps aren't supported: "GDI+ just refuses to cooperate in allowing me to do that."

Luckily, I found a free tool, AlphaConv, that will convert png files to 32-bit bmp files. My process is as follows.

1) Create a png in Paint.NET with 32-bit Bit Depth.

2) Drag and drop the png into AlphaConv with Target format set to .bmp.

3) Copy the resulting bmp file to my project directory, compile my application.

Sometimes a string isn't enough, you need a stream. Unfortunately, there isn't a direct method to stick a string into a stream. But we are saved! MemoryStream will take bytes... here's how to convert your string into a series of bytes so you can get that all important StringStream. No, I'm not going to make a StringStream class though you certainly can fulfill your masochistic class explosion desires.

Microsoft has released the Vista UX Guidelines in pdf format, for those of you that want it on the go (or want an easy way to print it). 

The big question I have is... why not xps? Is Microsoft's own format not good enough for them?