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 has 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: 359 File Name: Friendly_IDE_2008.zip

Friendly IDE for Visual Studio 2005

Downloads: 311 File Name: Friendly_IDE_2005.zip

C# - F# Scheme

ASPX - HTML - XML Scheme