C# – How to make VS2010 look and feel like VS2008

For those who do not like the feel of VS2010, we are sharing the same shoes!
Even after SP1 install, VS2010 still feels sluggish, and it looks so Eclipse-like.

After performing these 3 tweaks below, my VS2010 now look like this. 😀

VS2010 with VS2008 look

Here they are:

Tweak #1 – IDE Performance
In Tools> Options > Environment > General
– Uncheck “Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance”.
– Uncheck “Enable rich client visual experience”
– Uncheck “Use hardware graphics acceleration if available”

There are other tweaks discussed in this thread. But this one step is enough for me.

Tweak #2 – Color Theme
In Tools > Extension Manager
– Search for an Extension called “Visual Studio Color Theme Editor” in online gallery.
– Install it. Go with Theme > Windows Classic
– This should take care of the hideous purple skin color
As discussed in this thread.

Tweak #3 – Change the form icon.
The idea is to replace the embedded purple icon in VS2010’s devenv.exe to the VS2008 one. There are various ways, but here is what I did:
– Use IconChanger from Shellabs here. Trial version should suffice.
– Locate VS2010 devenv.exe file. By default it is in
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe”.
– Replace its embedded icon with VS2008 one. By default it is in
“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe”.

IconChanger screenshot from Shellabs

This third step makes that gloomy VS2010 ribbon goes away from your top-left screen, replaced with the sunny VS2008 ribbon.

That’s it! Hope you have a sunny coding day.