August 7, 2008 by
ryan
This is a really short post but I wanted to pass the word along. I just finished a fun little ASP.NET MVC Application to generate Visual Studio
themes based off of 3 given colors. I have always felt that selecting
every color to make a coherent theme is way too repetitive. This web
application automatically chooses complements / contrasts based off
your initial color selections (and uses jQuery to let you preview your
theme before creating). I will be making another, more detailed post later that will explain how it all works but for now, check it out and let me know what you think.
View the application
June 5, 2008 by
ryan
This may be common knowledge but it was new to me. If you're ever hand mangling control position in a winforms designer you can setup keybindings for Bring to Front Send to Back options that are normally available on the controls context menu. This is really useful if you have layers of controls and you can't always get to the Context.
- Click on Tools -> Options
- Under Environment, Select the Keyboard menu
- Type "Format.BringtoFront" (or "Format.SendtoBack") in the "Show Commands Containing" box
- Choose your shortcut keys
- Press Assign
Thanks to my friend Ross for pointing this out.
March 5, 2008 by
ryan
Last week, PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 was released. The plug-in adds lots of time-saving enhancements to Visual Studio. Unfortunately, there appears to be a weird side-effect when building Outlook plug-ins (and possibly some other project types). Visual Studio would close unexpectedly without any warning or error message. Tracking it back to to the PowerCommands plug-in was difficult, however, this MSDN forum posting pointed me in the right direction. Upon removing PowerCommands, everything worked well again. It appears people have had similar experiences with other project types as well. Hopefully there will be a fix soon and I can begin using it again 
. Maybe this will save someone a bit of headache.
January 30, 2008 by
ryan
Okay the title is a bit over the top :) Recently I was playing around with the vs settings after reading Scott Hanselman's article on black/white IDE colors and came up with this. I am still using the Monaco font and a lot of the same ideas, however, I toned down the colors slightly. Here are some screen shots of various languages in the .NET environment with the 'frickinsweet' settings file applied.
C# With the modified settings
VB.NET
HTML (well... in the context of ASP.NET)
F# (I really need to learn this language)
I have put the file for download frickinsweet.vssettings (10.73 kb)
You should get the Monaco or Envy Code R font for best results :)
To install the new settings file:
- Click tools
- Import and Export Settings
- Choose 'Import Selected Environment Settings' and click Next
- Backup current settings and continue
- Browse to the download location and click Next
- The Next screen you can confirm that you're overwriting just the fonts and color and click Finish
Please let me know what you think.
Update: Rob Conery has an alternative theme for Visual Studio available here.
Disclaimer: Download this at your own risk. Back up your current settings before adding the new one -- just to be safe.