Why is it so difficult to add menu item icons in Visual Studio

I may be missing something, but I find it hard to credit that Visual Studio doesn't include an easy way to add icons to menu items. I'm playing around with C#, creating Windows apps and all I want to do is have the standard icons beside the File > New and File > Open menu items. Creating the menu bar and its contents is very easy, but there seems to be no easy way to add icons, and MSDN is unhelpful on the solution.

I found a potentially helpful article at:
http://www.csharphelp.com/archives2/archive416.html
but it's only helpful if you're an experience C# programmer – it's way over my head!

I'd have thought that so many Windows app use these standard menu items, Visual Studio would add the icons, standard shortcuts and Alt key combinations by default. It's such a huge, complex program, I'm amazed they didn't think about adding an easy method of adding menu item icons.

However, having said all that, I've just noticed that IE doesn't use icons for File > New and File > Open, it only uses them for pages and directories in the Favorites menu. Weird!