Dark Side with Blue Hues

Saturday, May 31 2008 - , , , - 3 comments

I have many colleagues who have touted the merits of dark backgrounds in Visual Studio and I have tried several variations, yet I always end up back on white. It is not so much that the background needs to be white, rather it is more that I have never found a good mixture of foreground colors that work well on a dark background. Well, I spent some time this evening trying some new settings out. I was determined to find something better for me ... something that would not bother my eyes nearly as much as the bright white backgrounds. Here is what I came up with:

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It is a mixture of mostly blue, red, green and purple hues that seem to work pretty well for my eyes so far. It is not a true black background either. I found that if I stick to a charcoal background the colors are a bit less striking (to me of course). I like the faded look in general and imagine I will be tinkering with this for a while.

Here is how some XAML looks using my new scheme:

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The red items are error highlighting from the Resharper styles. I had to tinker quite a bit to get all of the styles to work well, especially since Resharper 4 has its own styles that it injects. Will I keep this theme? Who knows. If you want to try it, I have attached the Dark Side with Blue Hues settings file here. However be warned that you should first backup your settings file before trying any new ones. (This means "try new settings at your own risk")

I'll be turning it back to normal if I take any screen shots for my chapters or articles, though. No need to force my craziness on the editors :)

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1 Beta Download

Monday, May 12 2008 - , , , , , - 1 comments

Soma announced this morning that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP 1 is now ready and can be downloaded. This includes several updates, includes support for SQL Server 2008, and has a few new products including the Entity Framework, LINQ to Entities and ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria). ScottGu posted some notes regarding what's included in the service pack, as well.

Of course all of this is released 2 days before I have a demonstration on the Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities on Wednesday to the Sarasota .NET and SQL Server User groups. So I have a few modifications to make for my presentations.

I received an error when I first tried to install it. The problem was that the service pack was in conflict with Silverlight Tools Beta for Visual Studio 2008 which I was using to create/edit Silverlight 2 applications. Once uninstalling this i was able to get the service pack to install properly. Scott Gu's post discusses this issue as well as the importance of making sure you install Vista SP 1 first.

Check out ScottGu's post for full details.