Section :: Rants and Raves

Visual Studio 2012 - no longer 50 shades of grey!

by Huw Collingbourne

Now in Colour

Wednesday 13 June 2012.

According to the French language technical site, Developez.com, Microsoft has responded to all the criticism of the depressingly grey user interface in Visual Studio 2012 but giving users the ability to put back the colour!

It was announced at TechEd in Orlando that Visual Studio 2012 would come with an option to use the same colours as Visual Studio 2010. This is only partly good news as, frankly, some of us aren’t too keen on the VS 2010 default colours either. Let’s hope that VS 2012 supports the full range of colour tweaks available using the VS Color Theme Editor.

That just leaves the pesky uppercase menu labels to undo. Fortunately, there is a fix for that too. With luck, it should be possible to make VS 2012 look as though nothing has changed. At least it hasn’t got that pesky ’ribbon’ thing!

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Visual Studio 2012 - no longer 50 shades of grey!
17 June 2012, by Brad

Huw- It looks like MS is really going to fubar VS 11 with Metro and a lot of other changes that will kill their market share.

One IDE I recently found that looks very impressive is the free and open source Lazarus Free Pascal IDE which is inspired by Delphi. It runs on windows, linux and mac. It supports win32, GTK, QT and Cocoa/Carbon. I would love to see this IDE support other languages like C/C++.

Have you tried the D language? Its a fast compiled language, but it supports garbage collection and safe pointers. It looks to be good middle ground between unsafe C++ and VM languages like Java/C#
- Visual Studio 2012 - no longer 50 shades of grey!
  18 June 2012, by Huw Collingbourne
  
  I looked at Lazarus some time ago. I must bring myself up to date. If you are interested in D see our interview with Walter Bright. It’s a few years old but still of interest, I think: http://www.bitwisemag.com/copy/programming/d/interview/d_programming_language.html