Visual Studio 11 RC to get some color love (Grey is less grey, tool windows are not all caps and we've got some color!)

The Visual Studio Blog - Visual Studio 11 User Interface Updates Coming in RC

With the release of Visual Studio 11 Beta back in February of this year, we introduced changes to the user experience based on two core design principles, the first being to give you more space for your content and the second being to draw more focus to that content. Since the debut of these changes there’s been significant community response and feedback. We’ve taken this feedback and based on what we heard have made a number of changes planned for Visual Studio 11 RC. I want to thank you for your continued feedback through this blog, and also through the various other community channels - please keep it coming.

The purpose of this post is to provide you with an update on the changes we’ve made since beta. I’ve also included a brief summary of the beta feedback that we’ve leveraged in making these updates.

Beta Feedback

We have been fortunate in getting a lot of actionable user feedback relating to the Visual Studio 11 Beta release. In sorting through the feedback we found it to be primarily focused on three aspects of the new themes.

• An overall desire for more visual “energy” and contrast
• Calls for a more balanced application of Metro styling
• A desire for greater icon clarity and differentiation through the use of color

Here is a quick glimpse at the changes we’ve made from beta to RC in keeping with what we heard from you. Each of the changes reflected in these screenshots is called out in detail within the remainder of this post.

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So much better. With this tradeoff I'm actually starting to like the new VS11 RC styling over VS10. Now all they need to do is proper case the Menu's (they got the Tool Window Titles!) and I think I'm a happy camper...