I blame it on being forced to sit through one too many episodes of my wife’s favorite TV show, What Not To Wear, but I finally became inspired to retire my old, tired-looking default Visual Studio color scheme in favor of one of the hipper ones with a black background.

It turned out to be much easier than I thought since several bloggers already went to the trouble of exporting and publishing their favorite Visual Studio settings files, which you can import by simply selecting the ‘Import and Export Settings’ menu option under the Tools menu.

My favorites are the ones that try to mimic the Vibrant Ink theme from TextMate, the popular Rails IDE for the Mac. Rob Connery posted a nice version, but I finally settled on the one published by John Lam here.

Here’s a screen shot of me perusing CodeCampServer, the most excellent sample app for the upcoming ASP.NET MVC in Action book from Manning and that’s being written by Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, and Jimmy Bogard.

Mostly I’m happy I made the switch because I think the new color schema is easier on my eye, but I also can’t help but notice that I feel slightly more positive towards my otherwise homely and rather bloated IDE.

I guess the moral of the story is that you should never underestimate the power of lipstick when confronted with a pig.

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