Friday, July 17, 2009

Visual Studio Fonts and Colours

I got tired of the colours in VS2008 so asked on twitter if anyone has some themes. Got a good response of links to themes.

Here are the main links I was sent:

Scot Hanselman’s Blog
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioProgrammerThemesGallery.aspx
Iain Holder’s Blog
http://tech-nous.blogspot.com/2008/10/visual-studio-2008-colour-schemes.html
Is your IDE Hot or Not
http://idehotornot.ning.com/

Mohamed Meligy
http://geekswithblogs.net/Mohamed/archive/2007/08/20/Dark-Visual-Studio-With-Resharper---My-VS-Settings-Colors.aspx

If you use ReSharper  the normal settings people export don’t work correctly and you will have to do a lot of customisations yourself.

I based mine on Mohamed’s one and have done some changes, especially to XML and HTML views. I have found it much easier on my eyes and really enjoy it. So I thought I would share it with the interwebs.

image Please remember these Fonts and Colours are for VS2008 + R#

Tools | Import and Export Settings | Import selected environment settings | Yes, save my current settings | Browse |VS2008R#Dark-FontsColours.vssettings | make sure it is importing Fonts and Colours only | Finish | Enjoy

Let me know if you like them.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Windows 7 beta

After spending half a day fighting with MSDN subscriber downloads on the day of release on Thursday, anyone can now download it from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-ownload.aspx and give it a try. I of course had to test it out, see if the companies software I write installs and works on it ;). I fired up Windows 7 x86 in a Virtual Machine, I currently use VirtualBox which I think rocks ! about 35 minutes later it was done, install perfectly worked right off the bat. Runs a lot better than the Vista VMs I have and the only tweaking I had to do was use the Compatibility Troubleshooter to install the Guest Additions, but that was it.

Feeling confident with the new operating system I wipe my Dell XPS M1730 laptop and installed Window 7 x64 replacing my current Vista x64. It installed quickly ran and with no problems, only had to install the latest Nvidia drivers to get better resolutions, but then I had to do that on Vista too. You can pick Laptop Nvidia driver direct from Nvidia now and not the rarely update ones by laptop vendors. The rest of the hardware which was unknown after install was picked up by Windows update which was the Creative inbuilt laptop camera and the Ricoh Memory card reader. Been x64 bit I was a bit worried as Vista x64 half a year ago took me ages to get everything running and I really had to hunt around for the drivers, Windows 7 x64 just worked, nice.

It runs really well, it is slicker and snappier than Vista, it looks very much like Vista but the changes have made a huge difference. For a beta it is bloody good, well done Microsoft. Now to finish installing the useful software as TweetDeck won’t get any of my work done.

Technorati Tags: