In the old times of Visual Basic 5.0 / 6.0 (which used the Office commandbars), those IDEs lacked the concept of commands that Visual Studio .NET 2002 introduced, and buttons (CommandBarButton) were created calling the CommandBar.Controls.Add method with suitable parameter values. The CommandBarButton class lacked the Click event (it was introduced in newer versions of Office) so a horrible hack to get events from buttons was provided.

It happens that Visual Studio .NET 2002 and higher still allow that way of adding buttons (without a command) and its CommandBarButton class provides the Click event, so it is quite easy. I have written an article to show this approach although it is not recommended for the reasons mentioned in the article:

HOWTO: Create a CommandBarButton without a command from a Visual Studio .NET add-in
http://www.mztools.com/articles/2011/MZ2011017.aspx

The only scenario where I have had to use this approach is in the Options window of my MZ-Tools add-in, which has controls such as listviews where I want to provide a context menu with the look and feel of the Visual Studio ones (see HOWTO: Create a context menu using a Visual Studio commandbar popup from an add-in), but I don’t want a command for the buttons of the context menu (they don’t make sense in that scenario).

As for custom pictures in buttons created with that approach, they are as difficult as usual ;-). The article provides a reference to this other article HOWTO: Creating custom pictures for Visual Studio .NET add-ins commands, buttons and toolwindows which has a section about “Custom pictures for add-in buttons without a command”.