As developers we often spend a large part of our day staring at code within Visual Studio.  If you are like me, after awhile the default VS text color scheme starts to get a little boring.

The good news is that Visual Studio allows you to completely customize the editor background and text colors to whatever you want – allowing you to tweak them to create the experience that is “just right” for your eyes and personality.  You can then optionally export/import your color scheme preferences to an XML file via the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu command.

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu]

New website that makes it easy to download and share VS color schemes

Luke Sampson launched the http://studiostyles.info/ site a week ago (built using ASP.NET MVC 2, ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010).

Studiostyles.info enables you to easily browse and download Visual Studio color schemes that others have already created.  The color schemes work for both VS 2008 and VS 2010 (all versions – including the free VS express editions):

image

Color schemes are sorted by popularity and voting (you can vote on whether you find each “hot or not”). 

You can click any of the schemes to see screen-shots of it in use for common coding scenarios.  You can then download the color settings for either VS 2010 or VS 2008:

image

You can also optionally upload color schemes of your own if you have a good one you want to share with others. 

If you haven’t visited it yet – check it out: http://studiostyles.info/  And thank you Luke Sampson for building it!

Hope this helps,

Scott