Coding Day

After reading interesting posts about the fonts and colors in Visual Studio, I gave a try to some of them. Because I work quite a lot with Visual Studio, I realized that it is actually very important for the eyes and for productivity. Unfortunately none of the themes have pleased my friendly IDE concept, low contrast, dark background, pale colours, clear type fonts, and follow metaphors.

I also put some time to design and experiment with some fonts and colours. It is somewhat inspired from VibrantInk theme, but this theme was to dark for me with very high contrast, and the fonts were glowing. 

This theme is still dark but with pale colours. More importantly it follows the metaphors we used to, so it will be OK when discussing with developers. What I mean? You know greenish parts of your code are always comments, or red parts of SQL code is bad (strings for dynamic SQL), as we all used to from visual studio, SQL or any popular IDEs.

One more thing is that when working with F# some of the color features are not the same as C#. So this theme is prepared with the F# projects in mind as well. Also HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and  XAML are formatted following my colour preference.

For fonts I have used DejaVu font with size 10. If Consolas is your favourite font than, it would be better to put on size 9.

Moreover if you use, ReSharper code refactoring tool it has also some colour highlights for it as well. But it is not a problem if you don’t.

Friendly IDE for Visual Studio 2008

Downloads: 414 File Name: Friendly_IDE_2008.zip

Friendly IDE for Visual Studio 2005

Downloads: 363 File Name: Friendly_IDE_2005.zip

C# - F# Scheme

ASPX - HTML - XML Scheme

It is explained on Windows SDK blog how to integrate the updated Windows SDK with Visual Studio. However, how about the documentation and help integration with Visual Studio or even the search for API references ? I was using the online SDK until I figured out a work around.

Here are the steps to enable the updated help collections system for Windows SDK with Visual Studio. So at the end, the internal help function will will work with the updated help if necessary.

1. In Visual Studio , use the menu to navigate to Help -> Index
2. This will run up Microsoft Document Explorer (and yes it is different than MSDN)
3. Make sure that the results are unfiltered, in the “Look for” field search for “Collection Manager”,
4. On the results tree click to collection manager -> Help
5. Than select the Microsoft Windows SDK Collection checkbox. You can also have additional help integrated with the document explorer.
6. Update VSCC.

That’s it. Instead of the chm file it is useful to use from Visual Studio with the search capabilities.

Lots of releases happening this week because of Mix 08. For Mix08 releases you might want to check Tim Sneath’s blog.

But beside mix conference a research operating system  from Microsoft Research, “Singularity” is released. The source code can be found in their CodePlex Singularity site. It comes with a research development license.

It will be interesting to see how the academia will implement the new ideas in a managed operating system.