I was working on a project and wanted my own custom mouse cursor and did not easily find a way to make your own in ESRI’s instructions.  But, once you know how to do it, it is pretty easy.  In Visual Studio, Add a New Item:

Add a Cursor File:

You can edit your cursor with the editor program in Visual Studio.  Once you satisfied with how it looks, make sure that the Build Action on the cursor is ‘Embedded Resource’.

Then you can set your cursor with two lines of code. Note that my cursor is in my QDI.QdiAddIn Namespace:

Dim pCursorStream As System.IO.Stream = Me.GetType.Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("QDI.QdiAddIn.NewCursor.cur")
MyBase.Cursor = New System.Windows.Forms.Cursor(pCursorStream)