Visual Studio 2008 Colour Schemes

In the past year, the trend to modify your Visual Studio colour theme has gained momentum. Yes it's a trendy bandwagon, but it's not without merit. After using Oren Ellenbogen's Dark Scheme (via Scott Hanselman) for a while, I now find the default Visual Studio colours a trifle harsh.

The key is having a very dark, rather than black background. I have also adopted this for my desktop backgound using 56,56,56 rgb.

Here is Oren Ellenbogen's theme updated for Visual Studio 2008 transformed using Tomas Restrepo's xlst.




To save you the trouble of the transform, you can download my version of the Visual Studio 2008 theme here. It includes a couple of minor tweaks for ReSharper.

Here's to not all looking like Mr Magoo by the time we're 45.

ReSharper

I'm a huge fan of ReSharper from JetBrains. I've been using it for over three years now and I think I'd be lost without it. Take away my ReSharper and I might as well have notepad.

I think my top five most used features are:

1. Ctrl+left mouse click. This takes you to the thing you clicked on's definition.
2. Ctrl+E+C. Code cleanup. I have a custom rule that is called 'Everything but 'var'.
3. The NUnit integration. If you use NUnit in Visual Studio, you need ReSharper.
4. Find Usages
5. Ctrl+R+R. For renaming.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It's just probably what I use most day in, day out. Just go buy it. I promise that the first time you use a foreach snippet after defining something that's IEnumerable you will be smitten.