I've been asked a few times recently about my Visual Studio look and decided to share about it here.  Visual Studio gives the developer a lot of control over how the development environment looks.  From my experience, only a small percentage of people actually take advantage of it, but it is sometimes nice to change things up a bit.

Finding a Theme

The easiest way to give Visual Studio a "makeover" is to download someone else's custom Visual Studio theme and import it into your environment.  My current theme is based on Ragnarok Grey by Tomas Restrepo.  Tomas is a master dev environment themer and has made a bunch of Visual Studio themes.  That said, the best place to start looking for your theme is likely at Scott Hanselman's VS Theme gallery post.  Scott has put together a nice list of VS Themes along with pictures and links.

Installing a Theme

Once you've found a theme that you like and found a download link, you should have a .vssettings file.  (Note: Make sure you get the file for the version of Visual Studio you are using.  They can be converted, but that is another topic.)

Now, you simply need to import it in Visual Studio.  Luckily, there is a simple Visual Studio wizard to walk you through the process and make a backup of your current settings should you want to go back to what you have now.

The wizard is found under the Tools menu and the option is called Import and Export Settings.  In 3 simple steps, you chose import settings, save your theme (or skip), and then browse out to find your downloaded theme and apply it.

Customizing a Theme

The changes from a downloaded theme can be pretty dramatic and you might want to tweak it a bit.  You might want the font size smaller or larger.  Maybe just a different font.  You might all find that you have some things that just don't look nice.

Head on into options (Tools...Options) and make the changes that you need.  The Fonts and Colors sections gives you a nice preview of what you'll be getting for the different types of items.

My theme

As I mentioned earlier, I've been using pretty much the stock Ragnorak Grey theme.  I have made a few small changes for ReSharper 4.0 EAP.  The theme didn't cover the ReSharper Styles and a few of them were just unreadable.  So if you a ReSharper guy or gal, you'll likely need to check those ReSharper display items and make sure they are readable in the theme you choose.

Update 04/14/2008:  I've removed the fix below now that the BlogEngine.NET team has made an official announcement.  Upon further review, 1.2.0.0 users were not effected by this security flaw and there isn't much reason for this patch to exist.  If you have already used this patch, please update your software to version 1.3.1.0 as soon as you get a chance.  (The update will add the js.axd line back into your web.config.)  You should then remove the JSInsert extension from your installation.

I was made aware of a security issue in BlogEngine.NET just over an hour ago.  I wanted to make an immediate fix available for who wanted it.  The team will work up an official hot fix for this soon, but this can hold you over until then.

If you are a BlogEngine.NET user running 1.2 or 1.3, I'd strongly suggest you follow the instructions below.

First, if you are running 1.3.0.0, there are a few people who have already made the fix to the core.dll and have made it available for download.  If you aren't comfortable with that or have 1.2 or a version in between the releases that you don't want to take the time to update immediately, follow on.  Head on over to the BlogEngine.NET project site to get the patch.

First, you remove the js.axd handler from the web.config.  To do this, you need to open your web.config file, scroll to the bottom and find the httpHandler section.  There is a line with the js.axd handler listed.  You can just remove it.

I'm including a copy of the web.config file that was release as part of 1.3 with this line removed below.  If you've never edited this file and are using 1.3, you may just put this new file in place.

Second, since we are removing functionality, we need to add it back in another way.  I made a quick extension that will do just that.  Simply copy the extension file, JSInsert.cs into your your App_Code\Extensions folder.

Following these 2 simple steps should secure your blog from this new vulnerability.

Download the updated web.config

Download the JSInsert Extension