It can be difficult to determine where colors are used in Visual Studio (I’m working on making it easier to determine where colors are used for a future version of the extension), and it may seem daunting to consider editing the values of hundreds of colors. You’ll notice that the color service exposes hundreds of colors, accumulated over many releases of Visual Studio. The text editor and tool windows based on it (such as the Output window) already use a different user-customizable color service (in ToolsOptionsEnvironmentFonts and Colors), and are not affected by this extension. However, other tool windows (such as the Solution Explorer) use native Win32 controls, which are rendered based on the current Win32 theme and are not inherently color-aware inside of Visual Studio. There are a number of specific tool windows (like the Toolbox and the Start Page) that use colors from this color service, so their colors can also be customized. These are colors that can be read programmatically by anyone via the IVsUIShell.GetVSSysColorEx method. What colors are in the shell color service?Ĭolors used by the command and window management system can be customized using this extension. I have just released an extension for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 that allows users to customize colors used by our shell color service. Many users have requested different color themes for Visual Studio, or for the ability to change color themes to suit their preferences. After installing the RC/RTM version of the extension and starting Visual Studio, you themes should be automatically upgraded, and the random colors should go away. Install the RC/RTM version of the extension (now available at the link provided below). You will see Visual Studio starting up with random colors if you have kept the customization from Beta 2 OR customize again in Visual Studio 2010 RC using the Beta 2 version of this extension.Ģ. Follow the “Uninstall” instructions at the end of this post and make sure you uninstall the extension and do the cleanup as detailed. To remedy this problem, please do one of the following:ġ. Users who installed this extension for Beta 2 and customized the theme for VS2010 Beta 2 : If you have installed VS2010 RC on the same computer, you may experience a “rainbow colored” VS. The RC version of the extension is now available (using the same link).

Microsoft office color palette codes