Since Visual Studio 2005 just came out, most projects we do are in the transition phase: should we go with the proven Visual Studio .NET 2003 with .NET 1.1, or should we go with the latest and greatest Visual Studio 2005 with .NET 2.0? As you can probably guess, this really depends on our requirements and our clients.
Personally, I work on multiple projects and therefore need to use both the old Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the new Visual Studio 2005. In order to start the applications faster, I placed both shortcut icons on my desktop so I won't have to dig through the Start Menu in order to find my application. However, putting both icons on your desktop creates a new problem: which icon corresponds to which application?
As you can see, text for the icons on your desktop are truncated if the text is longer than 2 lines. Since Microsoft Visual Studio is itself way too long, you never get to see the year of the label. Since the year is the only way to determine which version of Visual Studio this shortcut corresponds to, you're stuck. And of course, the icon is exactly the same so you can't tell based on the icon which is which.
So this is a simple problem with a simple solution: just rename the text.
It would have been nice if Microsoft realized this problem and done something out of the box (maybe create a new icon, or rename the default shortcut's long text), but i can bet this is a low priority item even if they did notice this.
Fortunately this must have been a noticeable bug that SOMEONE noticed during the Visual Studio 2005 development cycle. If you take a look at the 16x16 based icon, someone made the VS 2005 icon look noticeably darker:
Since at 16x16, text is rarely showing, the icon is the only way to distinguish between each other. So it looks like someone up at Microsoft noticed this scenario and made the changes to the icon. In the image above, the VS icon on the left is for 2003, while the VS icon on the right is for 2005.
Also for fun, here's a zoomed in version of the 32x32 and the 16x16 icons. As you can see, the large icon does not have any clear differences, while the smaller one is very clear to distinguish which is which.
So if the person up at Microsoft who made the change to the small icon ever reads this, I want to thank you for pushing for this change. Now push for the icon change for the 32x32 version! 