Visual Studio Coloring Scheme

Stefan Kamphuis — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:49:34 GMT

I’ve been noticing quite a few developers start to change the default coloring scheme of Visual Studio to “something darker”. It’s supposed to be more relaxing for your eyes and hey… we all want to be relaxed while coding, right? I mean, we don’t want it to start to look like working.

Well, today I found myself a few minutes to browse for a nice coloring scheme to use myself. Tried to find a few a bit Blend-ish, but found most somewhat too colorful. Too much contrast doesn’t feel all that right to me.

Eventually I decided to stick with this one for a while, not in the last place because it has some settings to make Resharper fit in nicely. Besides that, the colors seem bright at first, but are well chosen. I did change some font sizes from rather large to rather small (like for the Output Window), downloadable below.

I should try and see how many hours I can work without taking a break with these colors .

Anyway: here's screenshot:

And here's the download from my Sky Drive:

Have fun!

The custom tool 'MSLinqToSQLGenerator' failed

Stefan Kamphuis — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 07:30:54 GMT

"Oh darn... it's one of those again". That was there first thing I thought recently when all-of-a-sudden I got an error in VS2008 after trying to open up a generated DBML file in the Object Relational Designer:

"The operation could not be completed."

Now that's helpful, isn't it? After a bit of digging in the output window I also found this one:

"The custom tool 'MSLinqToSQLGenerator' failed. Could not retrieve the current project."

The part about the custom tool lead me to think it would probably be an issue with an AddIn. But unfortunately, the AddIn manager in VS2008 doesn't have an entry for this tool. But still this was close to the solution. Somehow, somewhere (in a galaxy far, far away) Visual Studio encountered an error in the tool and must have marked it not be started again. Ever.

Anyway: In the registry, I deleted all subkeys below HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages and it worked like a blast again.

Thanks to this post on the MSDN forums.

Technorati Tags: LINQ,Visual Studio 2008

SuperSKa Weblog : Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio Coloring Scheme

The custom tool 'MSLinqToSQLGenerator' failed