{Programming} & Life

Hi all,

We’ve arrived at the weekend once again, horray! However, if you are anything like me, work (or play, depends on what code you’re wrestling with at the moment) doesn’t finish at the weekend – and for me that means getting closer to the dream and laying more code down into a personal project…

So if you’re stuck in Visual Studio for the majority of your life, or even if you’re a part time player and just wish to spice up your IDE, then you may want to look into some of the rad things you can do with the in-build colours and appearance tools in Visual Studio.

Honestly, who says that programming shouldn’t be a [visually] blissful experience? An experience that you look forward to? A down right enjoyable experience which can be created in an instant by applying a few colours and styles.  Just by doing these few things you might find it much easier and comfortable for those hours on end code cutting. (I have to be careful in my selection of words here, because I know a lot of you would find coding an enjoyable experience, but I am particularly speaking in terms of environment in which to do your work).

SO, with that said; I’ve set out in this post to show you guys my particular selection of such a theme, well my variation on an already well designed theme.  I’ve found I can use it day to day no problem, and I think most importantly, it’s one I have not grown sick of and still find it really visually appealing. It’s a variable colours on black background theme with my change from the original theme design utilising Microsoft’s delicious Consolas Font, meaning you can gloat on to all your fellow white background, courier new coders still running the standard setup. 

Moreover, I really wanted to give props to the creator of this theme and share it with anyone that may not be familiar.I’ve been using it for well over a year now and it’s labelled the Desert Nights theme for Visual studio, and it’s available over at Tomas’ Site – Winterdom.com.

Tomas has done an excellent job on colour selection and styling for this theme that’s why one, I wanted to share it, but two offer the variation I have created against it.  (However, if you would prefer to use Tomas’ there is a 2008 compatible version which he put up you can also check out, as it was initially written against VS 2005.)

So hear are my variations listed below (I will only discuss what’s changed):

• Primary editor font swapped from Envy Code R VS to Consolas, 9pt.
• Dark brown/grey background colour to /// commenting blocks and removal of italics
• Included tool window theme adjustments:
  • Output Window: Custom Lime, Calibri, 8pt.
  • Find Results Window: Custom Lime, Calibri, 10pt.
  • Immediate Window: Custom Lime, Calibri, 12pt.

Sounds like I’m writing specs to a custom show car paint job hey? =P
And below a screenshot (based almost completely off Tomas’ screenshot, but added some LINQ and Lambda, I know it was pointless.  What is more pointless is I did actually test if this console program compiled and if two animals were returned :p)

also I think it’s important to see what the HTML colouring looks like as I found myself checking this out on each theme anyway:

Download: My Variation on the Visual Studio 2008 Desert Nights Theme
(To install: Visual Studio –> Tools –> Import  and Export Settings –> Import Selected Environment Settings –> Select file and personal options). 

Enjoy your weekend, and I want to say thanks to all the guys who have been visting lately, especially the newcomers from www.dotnetkicks.com and www.dotnetshoutout.com I really love the support and I have two juicy articles I am really excited about sharing when I get a chance to write them up…

Now I better scoot over to winterdom.com myself and let Tomas know I’ve blogged about him =p