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

A custom theme

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).

Disable visual effects

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.

Have to write lots of code in VS, here is a excellent time saver

A new version of Visual Studio was released recently, so it's time to talk about it. The 2010 release of

Visual Studio with Visual Assist

this most popular IDE for Microsoft Windows adds a number of new features, a new language (F#), a overhauled WPF based user interface that looks and performs better, multi-monitor support (it was about time) a new browser based help system, a improved debugger (historical debugging can be incredibly useful, really), and a lot more. It also comes with a new .NET framework (version 4) and the ability to build for different platform toolsets - even in C++ it is possible to build for the old Visual C++ 2008 version, thus avoiding the need for a new runtime at the user's end and new toolsets can be added with relative ease.

Also, Visual Studio 2010 has a new extension system which should greatly simplify the development of add-ins (aka extensions). MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) is the name for the new extension framework and one of the most useful extensions that did exist for previous versions has already been adopted. I'm talking about Visual Assist X, a tool that aims at developers who need to write large amounts of code and have a strong demand for an improved code editor.

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Small things matter

It's annoying when all of a sudden, a nice feature you do not want to miss in your IDE, appears to be broken. That can really ruin your day. Now, we know that such things happen when you upgrade your environment to the next major release - it can still be annoying as hell.

Visual Studio 2010 is now out for a few days and so far it looks good. I'm using VS mostly for C and C++ work and from that point of view, it works fine and I have not yet found major showstopper bugs. One thing, however, made me almost tear my hair out - the comment task list. Every developer knows this feature - it's a convenient little thing that aids you in not forgetting important tasks left unfixed or unfinished in your code. The IDE will scan the code for certain tags inside comments (for example: TODO) and for each tag it finds, it will create a task list item.

Enable the Task List

So far so good. This was always working in Visual Studio, but for some reason, it didn't in 2010. No matter what comment I typed or what tag (predefined or self-defined) I was using, the task list kept itself totally empty. First, I thought it was a bug, but then, while browsing the advanced editor settings (which are new in VS 2010), I found the culprit: The feature is disabled by default. The screenshot shows where the setting is hidden and I must say, it is, without doubt, well hidden :) Why it is disabled by default, I do not know and since I found only a few hits on the web regarding this problem, it might even be an installation issue that does not happen on everyone's system. But if it does for you, then here is the easy fix.

Simply open the options, navigate to Text Editor->C++->Formatting and enable the option Enumerate comment tasks under the Miscellaneous section.

A good tool getting better

Eclipse as C++ IDE

I consider the C/C++ development tools (short: CDT) one of the best plugins for Eclipse. Since version 6, they are so good that Eclipse has become my favorite IDE for C and C++ development. The Eclipse code editor has always been good and CDT offers a host of nice features, like semantic highlighting (and this with good performance, even in large projects), excellent code navigation and very good code assistance. The CDT build system is flexible and does not force you to use one specific compiler (i.e. GCC) as it is perfectly possible to use the MS compilers and build tools.

Eclipse's integration of the Subversion version control system is also excellent and makes using SVN enjoyable.

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