Visual Studio 2012 Theme
When I checked out Visual Studio 2012, the first thing I noticed was how badly it looks and feels. You can choose from two color themes: Light for depressed developers (gray over gray) or Dark for the uber h4xx0r stranded in mom's basement. The Light theme doesn't look that bad on the screenshot below, but it would really suck the life out of me after a while and the new black icons in the Solution Explorer just make things worse. I'm not a big fan of this new design direction of Microsoft, but that's a subject for another article.
Meanwhile the extension Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor has been released by Matthew Johnson, he created the amazing theme editor for VS2010 too, which helped me to create my similar theme a couple of years ago. The new editor comes with some themes to choose from, including Blue which is similar to the standard VS2010 theme if you loved that one.
It took me quite some time, but I managed to recreate my Classic Silver-Blue theme starting out from Light. The overall picture is very positive, everything is themed nicely, including the Start Page, output windows and dropdown lists; I already feel much better working with it. Take a look and compare the themes! If you prefer the standard Light one, that's okay; I can imagine it growing on me after a while, but at least we have a choice.
My Classic Silver-Blue theme
Standard Light themeUnfortunately the editor doesn't have an easy import/export function yet, but I put notes into the theme package about the installation procedure. It's not hard at all, but involves some file copying and adding settings to the registry. Beside the editable version, you can install the theme in static mode without installing the theme editor, too. Bonus patch to change the uppercase menus is included separately. Also, if you can't stand them, there is a way to patch the icons with the ones from VS2010, but I don't want to go that far. Probably it's better to get used to the new ones to avoid future disappointment and frustration.
