Switch to Visual Studio Image Library for icons in the wizard

[mikebattista]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

VS designers recommended integrating with https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/image-service-and-catalog?view=vs-2022 to render icons in the wizard to better integrate with VS's designs. This will handle theming, contrast, accessibility, and other rendering requirements out of the box and enable us to use VS's existing icons and designers in the future for new icons.

Describe the solution you'd like

No response

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

Applies to the following platforms:

• WinUI
• WPF
• UWP

[mrlacey]

Which icons does this relate to?

There are two lots of icons in the wizard:

• The DrawingImages defined in TemplateStudioStyles.xaml
• The images accompanying each selectable item.

I can see a benefit for changing the first ones but not the second ones.

The first ones would be relatively simple to change, assuming that there are appropriate alternatives available. (I expect there will be but need to check)

Changing the use of XAML for the selectable items is likely to greatly limit what can be displayed there.
As these already scale and support theming I'm not sure of the benefit of making this change.

Note, that this can't only be done for WinUI, as the wizard code is shared by all extensions. It's not enough to confirm that there are sufficient alternatives for all the WinUI items, we'll also need alternatives for the WPF & UWP items too.
Trying to support both the current XAML images and an alternative would be undesirable from a support and maintenance perspective unless there are other clear benefits.

As the current wizard already supports theming and different contrast requirements. Plus has no known accessibility issues relating to the images, this feels like it should be a low priority task.
Or, are there any specific issues that need addressing?

[mikebattista]

This is for the icons in the wizard for each template. This is in the exploration phase so there's no commitment yet, but the goal would be to better integrate with VS's designs, address potential design issues that were pointed out by the VS designers, and allow us to leverage VS designers for new icons in the future.

[mrlacey]

This is in the exploration phase so there's no commitment yet,

Thanks for clarifying

but the goal would be to better integrate with VS's designs, address potential design issues that were pointed out by the VS designers, and allow us to leverage VS designers for new icons in the future.

What are the issues they pointed out?

If they were providing the icons, what would that mean for situations where the selectable item is a 3rd part library (like we have with Prism) there could be all sorts of issues potential issues with this.

It could also, potentially, lead to delays in releasing new templates while waiting for a version of VS that include the new icons.

I'd also want to know what would happen with an item that uses an image added in a newer version of VS. What would happen if the template/extension was used on an older version of VS that didn't have that image/icon?
I appreciate that having people always update to the latest version of VS is desirable but it's not always possible/practical.

[mikebattista]

We definitely don't want to tie ourselves to specific releases of VS. They have an icon library where we could download the xaml versions of the icons and embed them in the templates like we do today. Need to explore further and will keep these questions in mind.

[mikebattista]

Checked with VS today, and we do have options to effectively host new icons in our extension so that we wouldn't be tied to any particular version of VS.