Are you really bored of the default appearance of Visual Studio? Even it’s quite different from Normal Windows (XP) Menus and toolbars, yea I’m sure it’s really nice if we can customize the colors based on our mood.

Here’s a free tool to play around with Visual Studio 2010. You can edit the theme for Visual Studio with Visual Studio Color Theme Editor. It comes up with some default flavors of themes but we can also customize or download pre-created themes from any website. You can see a bunch of extensions, tools, themes etc. at Visual Studio Gallery.

Also studiostyles.info contains 100’s of themes to satisfy your moods. The Visual Studio 2010 extensibility library contains lot of gems to make everything in your way. Not only themes, the whole Visual Studio and it’s contents can be taken in your hand using Visual Studio 2010 SDK. It’s much more flexible and innovative than it’s predecessors. You can get a bit more detailed scoop here. Anyways have a nice time with colors

Bonus: How many of you guys are fascinated with keyboard shortcuts? I usually use mouse only if I can’t operate something with keyobard. Have you ever wished, if we could hide the unusable menubar? Matthew Johnson has written a nice extension to hide the menubar from Visual Studio 2010 IDE. On hitting, alt key will enable the menubar again. You can directly press the Alt+ Any (valid) key (e.g. Alt+F, Alt+T etc.)

Visual Studio 2005 first supported detach and move dockable windows outside the Visual Studio (window) client area. Output Window, Find Window, Watch Window, Properties Windows, or any dockable type Window can detached and can be moved outside the client area.

This is useful when we’re working with multiple monitors. But these versions of Visual Studio was unable to tear off Source Windows which makes the multiple monitor support quite handicapped.

Visual Studio 2010 Supports full multi monitor support. The dockable Windows and source windows can easily be tear-off from the client area and can place anywhere in the screen. This will help us for better code reference and moving unnecessary windows outside the Visual Studio. While debugging also we can exploit the facilities for better debugging.

You can see the detached window. My left monitor is having widescreen resolution while the right one having standard 4:3 resolution.

Detaching Window is really easy, just click on the titlebar of source/any dockable window. It will detach from the Visual Studio. Also re-attaching is simple by moving inside the client area. Visual Studio Will provided on screen guided support for placing the window. Try it yourself.