Oct 182012

I talk to people all the time about upgrading to Visual Studio 2012. There are some great technical reasons to upgrade, but almost no one likes the new user interface. One of the first questions is always, “Why are the menus in upper case?” Many also don’t like the color scheme because it looks a little dreary.

Fortunately, these are two easy things to fix. The first, the upper case letters, is super easy to fix. For Visual Studio Pro just add a key to the registry:

Open your registry editor.
Create a new key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USERS\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\
called SuppressUppercaseConversion. It should be a DWORD and set to the numeric 1.
Quit the registry editor and start up Visual Studio. You’ll notice that now the menus display as you were hoping.

Changing the color scheme is also pretty easy:

Open Visual Studio 2012 and to to Tools/Extensions and Updates
Find and load the extension called “Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor”
After it’s loaded you can go to Tools/Customize Colors to select on of the built in color schemes or create your own.

The toolbars can be modified to your liking. You would have done that with any release anyway. You can add toolbars based on views, add buttons to existing bars, or create your own bars.

There are so many good reasons to use Visual Studio 2012. Don’t let little appearances hold you back from trying it out.