Don't like the default dark-ish theme in Visual Studio 2010?

 

Well, me neither. For my taste, it is a bit too dark and I would prefer an IDE with a more Windows-like color scheme. Fortunately, this is possible, because Visual Studio allows to customize almost any color that is being used for the UI. It just does not provide an UI for it, but an extension which you can find here, will be more than happy to help out.

It comes with a few predefined color themes plus a theme editor that allows you to create your own themes. Doing so can be quite a bit of work, because the number of customizable colors is high. However, you can use one of the custom themes included in the extension as a base point for your own creations. The screenshot shows the included "classic" theme re-creating the classic Windows look. There are other themes, one that closely matches the Vista/Win7 Aero theme and 3 themes which almost perfectly fit the three standard Windows XP Luna styles (blue, olive and silver).

Also, if you don't like the colorful gradients and other effects (and as a side effect, want a slightly faster UI), you can disable the "rich client visual experience" (sounds cute, eh?) in Options->General (see screenshot at the right).

This won't disable custom colors themes, just the background texture and some of the gradient effects on tabs, menus and toolbars. Also, it will stop some of the animations. On slower machines, it may give you back some performance, but only if you are running Windows Vista or Windows 7, because on XP, the visual enhancements are disabled anyway.