Make Visual Studio look better with Visual Studio themes.

If you are a developer on the Microsoft world I’m sure you must be using the ultra-famous Visual Studio IDE day-in and day-out. Well, after using it for a while you might start to feel bored with the same old look and feel.

Not any more! You can customize Visual Studio to have different look. It is actually quite easy to do.

Start by clicking on the “Tools” and then the “Import and Export Settings…” menu.

On the “Import and Export Settings Wizard” dialog choose if you’d want to export or import the selected environment settings.

Exporting environment settings would allow you to apply the same theme settings on different machines while importing would allow you to import a custom theme setting. If you’ve made a mistake or the theme misbehaves you can also reset all environment settings.

If you are to export the settings Visual Studio will ask you for a filename and the location to save the file.

If you are to import a theme setting Visual Studio will prompt you with the above dialog so you can save the current settings before importing the new settings. If you are confident enough you can just go ahead and import the new settings which will eventually overwrite your current settings.

Choose the appropriate settings file you want to import from. For the settings to show up on your My Settings list you should have the .vssettings file under your “My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\themes” folder. If you don’t find the file you can, of course, browse for the .vssettings file.

Then choose the appropriate settings from the list. Since these are theme settings I would choose all the settings on the list.

Once you hit the “Finish” button Visual Studio will apply the theme settings and will acknowledge with the above dialog.

That’s it! You should now be able to see the new theme in action on your Visual Studio IDE. Keep in mind that these themes are meant to customize the fonts and colors on your IDE than the overall theme of Visual Studio. And, of course, customizing those fonts and colors would be ideal choice if you are spending day-in and day-out on Visual Studio.

I hope you find it useful. Let us know if you have any questions/comments regarding this.

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