Archive for November 23rd, 2007

23
Nov

VS2008 Color Schemes

Ever since I met Damien Guard last month and started reading his blog I’ve become somewhat of a fiend for fonts, color schemes, etc. This includes pimping out Visual Studio with whatever customizations possible. This morning I noticed a link from Damien’s blog to another blog (owned by Tomas Restrepo) that contains a slew of color schemes tweaked to perfection for the new RTM version of VS2008.

Ragnarok Grey looks pretty nice, and I bet would go very well with Damien’s own Envy Code R font. You should definitely check them both out. You might be surprised how much better it makes the coding experience :)

So I ended up going with Ragnarok Blue. That theme coupled with Damien’s Envy Code R font (size 10) is perfect.

23
Nov

UltraMon to the rescue!

I’ve been aware of UltraMon for a few years but for some reason never took the time to see whether it was worth the hype. I was reading this month’s MSDN magazine and noticed it listed in the toolbox article and finally decided to give it a shot. Now I’m staring myself down in the mirror wondering how in the world I was able to exist on this planet without it.

The fact that UltraMon splits your Windows taskbar across all monitors is just one of the many beautiful features. When you install UltraMon, by default it will place two new buttons in the title bar of every application window: one for toggling to the next monitor, and one for maximizing it across all monitors. Even better than that is the ability to create hotkeys for those functions. So now if I’m coding in Visual Studio on the main monitor directly in front of me and someone comes into my office and wants to see something I can just press the 2 key (this is configurable) and VS will immediately switch to the next monitor. Then if I want to display something large across all monitors I can just hit the 3 key (also configurable) and the window not spreads across all monitors. Perfect!

All-in-all UltraMon is truly sweet. My name is Jonathan Carter and I approve this software.