Our workaround for this is simply to reload the colour scheme whenever the 'Tools|Options' command has been executed. Within the displays themselves, the text and background colours of each item are checked for adequate contrast, and the text colour adjusted (by tweaking the luminance) automatically if need be.Īlthough the Visual Studio interfaces expose the colours used in the active theme (via IVsUIShell2::GetVSSysColorEx()), they do not seem to provide any way of detecting if the theme has changed (or indeed, finding out which theme is actually running at the time). yet haven't yet been looked at, but hopefully will be in due course (there seems to be some indication in the MSDN blogs that scrollbars will be auto-themed by the RTM, but we'll see). Other UI elements such as menus, scrollbars, command buttons, etc. With that in mind, we have been working on theme support in the development branch for Visual Lint for some time now, and things are now beginning to come together:Īs Visual Lint uses standard Win32 controls for most of the UI (which for the most part do not support custom text/background colours), to get this far, we have had to write custom painted WTL checkbox, radio button, combobox and header controls in addition to the usual WM_CTLCOLORxxxx voodoo. We will find out whether that assumption is correct later this month, of course. Our working assumption therefore has to be that the themes in the RTM will be broadly comparable with those in the RC (i.e., light and dark). Obviously, my view just isn't 'cool' enough for the Visual Studio UX team, but I digress.Īlthough a campaign to retain the existing Visual Studio 2010 theme has been running on the UserVoice site since the beta arrived (see Add some color to Visual Studio 11 and Leave VS 2010 theme (and the theme editor extension) as an option), Microsoft has not indicated what - if any - changes will be made to the Visual Studio 2012 themes at RTM. Personally, rather than develop custom theme support for each tool individually I wish they'd just add a 'dark' theme to Windows instead and respect the theme settings of the operating system. Whilst the latter has an obvious appeal within the developer community (we all know devs who prefer green text on a black background), the former hasn't exactly been welcomed, to say the least. The Visual Studio 2012 Beta and RC include two themes - light (i.e. However, eye candy (and eyesores!) come and go, and within that change is a more fundamental one - direct support for themes within the Visual Studio IDE. One of the unexpected (and I would suggest from the comments, unwelcome) changes sprung on developers in the Visual Studio 2012 Beta back in February was the Metroification of the development environment.

Visual studio themes