My Font and Color Settings for Visual Studio 2010

One of the first things I do each time I start using a new version of Visual Studio is to customize the font and color settings.

For Visual Studio 2010 this turned out to be a bit more complicated, though, because of the way XML documentation comments are rendered in the new editor.

I like my doc comments to be shown with a background color, but different from earlier versions of Visual Studio, VS2010 will not continue the background color until the right margin, but instead until the last character of the line – which turns out to be kind of ugly.

Fortunately, there’s an extension for that.

So in order to get something similar to this…

20100629_ColorScheme

 

…you’ll need the Background Color Fix extension by Noah Richards. Note that the extension doesn’t always reflect changes you make to the colors immediately; you’ll have to close and open documents or even restart Visual studio. But once you’re set, this is a non-issue.

My personal font and color settings for Visual Studio 2010 shown in the screenshot above can be downloaded here (right-click the link and "Save Target/Link As").

3 Comments

  • Hi Sean,

    the font is Segoe UI.

    Regarding submitting the scheme to http://studiostyles.info: I haven't found a way to upload the .vsettings file - the "Import" link expects some kind of JSON structure and I don't feel like redoing the configuration using the online editor.

  • So you changed from Verdana to Segoe UI.
    May I ask why?

  • @microfox: I switched from Verdana to Segoe UI a short time after moving from WinXp to Vista and "learning to live with ClearType" (to be fair, some details of ClearType were improved with Vista).

    When comparing Verdana, Tahoma and Segoe UI (all three suitable as a developer's font because of the difference between the lowercase i and uppercase L) on a system with ClearType enabled, Segoe UI has the best readability. Verdana is a bit wide, Tahoma a bit too narrow.

    And a huge advantage of Segoe UI is that words in bold are not dramatically wider - good for keywords and class names which I chose to be bold in my settings for Visual Studio.

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