Our first progress report for the “Month of Metro”.
One of the big changes in Visual Studio eleven is the new color scheme. Or should i say, lack-of-color scheme. Visual Studio 11 employs a new image style throughout the entire IDE for all icons, from project templates over toolbars to the files and other items in Solution Explorer.
Love it or hate it (and most people i talk to, including myself (yes, i talk to myself), haven’t really made it to the “love” side of things yet), but it’s unique and distinctive, and in order to be a proper citizen of Visual Studio 11, we have to embrace it.
I have spent the better part of yesterday working on our template icons and solution explorer icons, and i’m happy to share what we have come up with:
As you can see, i have tried to take some liberties, and not completely given up on color. In Visual Studio 2010, our project icons for Oxygene have been blue for .NET and yellow for Java, and i have stuck to that, and extended it to the code file icons as well, which show a subtle blue or yellow background shading.
Let us know what you think, but IMHO this retains a little bit of color in your solution, helps keep you distinguish between .NET and Java, if you happen to work with both, and i would say it still fits in nicely with the overal theming om the new Solution Explorer.
For reference, i have also included a C# project in the solution. In contrats to Oxygene, C# is entirely black-on-gray, and TBH i’m not really a fan of the “C#” text/logo as icon for the source code files – what do you think?
ps: my apologies. when i say “Solution Explorer”, i of course mean “SOLUTION EXPLORER”. ;)
