DEV Community: Austin Standing

Making a Theme for Visual Studio in 2021

Austin Standing — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 02:09:40 +0000

TL;DR

Midnight Deep

⚫ Midnight Deep aims to be a true dark theme for Visual Studio 2019.

This theme was born out of a need for darkness; to rest my eyes after an extended period of working long hours and feeling like all the other dark themes just weren't dark enough. This aims to be that dark theme. Midnight Deep draws from the palette of my first theme 🌌 Midnight Lights, while providing a true hex #000000 background and lower brightness generally. This won't be for everyone or every occasion, but my vision is to provide an after hours theme that will let your eyes find rest even when you can't.

That being said, I have tried to make the contrast acceptable for day-to-day use too. If you find yourself squinting because the glare off your monitor is brighter than the element you're trying to see, I recommend you try a lighter theme like the one mentioned above 😉 I will also apologize in advance and say there are way too many popups and features that can't be themed which may stun you after your eyes have adjusted to this theme.

My Process

Story Time

Ironically this extension was written and published from a mac. The process started with my first theme, which I was permitted to create using my work laptop at the time, and I used the then new Color Theme Designer, which allows you to create a custom theme as a full-blown solution with access to the .vstheme file and outputs a .vsix ready to go. I wrote about the experience here:

Making a Theme for Visual Studio in 2019

Austin Standing ・ Aug 20 '19 ・ 3 min read

#visualstudio #themes #showdev #darkmode

Sometime after publishing I had changed jobs, working for a healthcare company with a strict no personal projects policy. Suddenly I found myself with a Visual Studio extension to maintain, and only my personal laptop (a mac) to do it with.

A Breakthrough

I discovered and made heavy use of a blog from Meziantou detailing how to package an extension using Azure, and showing everything you need to do it. I used Azure DevOps pipelines to build and package my theme, and I could have even used it to publish updates directly to the VS Marketplace but found out the hard way that VsixPublisher does not support the Themes category. It even automatically increments my versioning 😁

My day to day would look something like this:

Use my work-in-progress theme on my work laptop
Take notes on my phone about what bugged me
Get home and open the project in VS Code on my personal laptop
Stumble around for the items in the .vstheme file
Commit changes to Azure
Download the build
Repeat

Needless to say, pretty ugly. I was doing a lot of guesswork and a lot of rework, and I didn't stick to it for long. Fortunately, I've since moved back to the job that allows me to work personal projects on my work laptop. My workflow has evolved, yet stayed largely intact.

Another Step

Once again having access to Visual Studio again outside of office hours, I found myself moving to the deprecated Color Theme Editor for Visual Studio 2019. While it's clearly signposted to look past this extension to the previously mentioned Color Theme Designer, it still feels quicker to use when you just want to troubleshoot a theme, or customize an existing one. My workflow grew into looking like this:

Use my work-in-progress theme on my work laptop
Take notes on my phone about what bugged me
In my freetime copy my WIP theme as a custom theme
Open the project in VS Code
Stumble around the Color Theme Editor for the items
Make changes and apply them to confirm they did what I thought
Make the same changes in the .vstheme file on my personal laptop
Commit changes to Azure
Download the build
Repeat

Learnings

This was great for me because whenever I had access to Visual Studio I could cut down the inner loop, but when I didn't have access I could still work on things. Being able to do both things sped up progress and kept me engaged. It also helps to have poured hours into trying to figure out the word salad naming conventions that have no documentation to tell you what That One Thing is called.

All in all it's been a good learning experience, and I intend to take my learnings back to Midnight Lights for another quality pass.

If you're interested in looking into how it was done, the code can be found below, and you may download Midnight Deep from the VS Marketplace here.

austinstanding / midnight-deep-vstheme

An original dark theme for Visual Studio 2019 by the creator of Midnight Lights

Midnight Deep Visual Studio Theme

⚫ Midnight Deep is a fork of my other theme 🌌 Midnight Lights available here. This aims to be a true dark theme for Visual Studio 2019.

This theme was born out of a need for darkness; to rest my eyes after an extended period of working long hours and feeling like all the other dark themes just weren't dark enough. This aims to be that dark theme. Midnight Deep draws from the palette of Midnight Lights, while providing a true hex #000000 background and lower brightness generally. This won't be for everyone or every occasion, but my vision is to provide an after hours theme that will let your eyes find rest even when you can't.

Installation

After installing the extension from the Marketplace, the theme will be available in the dropdown under Tools -> Options -> General.

Misc

CI/CD uses…

View on GitHub

Making a Theme for Visual Studio in 2019

Austin Standing — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 03:04:30 +0000

Just earlier this month, Microsoft released a new extension for theming in Visual Studio called Color Theme Designer. You read that right, Visual Studio, not VS Code! 😥😲 With the announcement I wanted to try my hand at making something I could enjoy, as there haven't exactly been many VS themes to choose from. I must admit here I never tried the old Color Theme Editor extension, though from the lack of themes and what was mentioned in the announcement, I can see why few did.

"If you were brave enough to create your own theme, you had to edit elements one by one from an unorganized list of 3,000+ vaguely named color tokens.

This summer, a group of interns has developed a newly released Color Theme Designer extension, and we’re hoping that making custom themes just got a whole lot simpler for beginner and advanced designers alike."

While there can still be moments that feel confusing, the process is bootstrapped by a "quick start", allowing you to start with a base theme then selecting primary, secondary, and accent colors.

This generates a palette of colors for you based on your selections. This got me about 90% to where I wanted to be, but there were still some ~~glaring problems~~ quirks.

Text and keywords had been altered in hue, but the editor background was the same. Menu backgrounds looked great, but their hover state had super low contrast. Don't get me started on my map mode scrollbar.

I developed some patience for using the color categories within "All Elements", but only after learning the hard way that I couldn't just mass update any color to a new one. Suddenly random text had an ugly background color that I couldn't get back to normal, and when highlighting text that background covered the highlight color. It was here I realized I hadn't started a git repo to track changes. Amateur hour! 🤦‍♂️

If you find yourself in this situation, here is the trick I used to get back on track. I made a second project using the same base theme and colors, then diffed the .vstheme file. I was able to save those changes I meant to keep, and revert the blanket changes I made. If you are doing anything more than a quick start, use version control!

In the end, I was super happy with the results. I now present to you my first ever theme, Midnight Lights.

While it still has quirks that I'm finding, It's been a fun learning opportunity. Hopefully within the next week I'll be publishing it as an extension, available within Visual Studio's new extension category of Themes! Until then feel free to download or fork it on GitHub.

austinstanding / midnight-lights-vstheme

Dark theme for Visual Studio 2019

Midnight Lights Visual Studio Theme

🌌 Midnight Lights is a dark theme for Visual Studio 2019, made with Color Theme Designer.

This is my first theme and you will probably find some quirks. This is a personal project, but feel free to fork the repository!

Installation

After installing the extension from the Marketplace, the theme will be available in the dropdown under Tools -> Options -> General.

Misc

CI/CD uses Azure DevOps, following Meziantou's Blog.

I like to extend my theme with Viasfora, mostly for Rainbow Braces. I've added my Viasfora theme within the github repo as viasfora-theme.json. If you're a Viasfora user, themes can be exported/imported from Tools -> Options -> Viasfora -> Import/Export.

Versions

v1.1.5

Modified peek background, updated theme icon

v1.1.1

Modified Razor code highlighting to better match theme

v1.1

Darkened editor background to match window backgrounds
Darkened menu…

View on GitHub

Have you tried the Color Theme Designer yet? What was your experience? What features/tweaks would you like to see?

UPDATE: The extension is now published! Install it from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Am I (not) a mid-level dev yet?

Austin Standing — Sun, 26 May 2019 01:36:34 +0000

What is a mid-level developer to you?

Photo credit Pexels.com, attribution isn't required but they are rad.

Story time. I had a recruiter reach out to me yesterday for the first time in ~9 months. After some conversation (possibly including self-assessment and salary topics) he admitted he had been passing over my name for mid-level positions, thinking I still considered myself to be junior. He suggested that I have another "tech assessment" phone call, implying "how much could have really changed?" when I feel he didn't really know me when we talked the first time around. (Not counting the degree I've been doing this ~4 years now.)

This got me wondering, how would a recruiter define the difference vs. how would a developer define the difference? without diving into unhealthy comparisons,

Where do you draw your arbitrary line in the sand?
Are there specific experiences you expect someone to have had before they can claim to be a mid-level developer?
Are there specific languages/frameworks they must know or certain concepts they should be able to explain off-hand?

UPDATE: I did have that tech assessment, and I felt really good about it! As my final question I asked what a mid-level dev was to the interviewer, and the things he mentioned were all things I do day-to-day. Some examples he gave:

Works with little to no supervision
Is always learning and improving
Does the work and documents as they go
Knows when to reach out for help
Helps more junior team members

What C# 8 Features Are You Most Excited For?

Austin Standing — Mon, 13 May 2019 17:47:31 +0000

I'm just now starting to catch up on Microsoft Build 2019, and even in the early stages I'm excited to put these new features to use.

For me, I'm looking forward to pattern matching and nesting switch expressions.

What C# 8.0 features are you most excited to see?

Habits I Don't Regret

Austin Standing — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 01:47:57 +0000

We all have some habits we’re proud of, and some we aren’t. Having been inspired by some of your posts about habits, here are some that have helped me keep consistent and keep learning.

Get to bed by 9:00 PM every night, including weekends

(There are always exceptions to this, but it helps with the next one.)

Get up at 5:00 AM every morning, including weekends

I’ve found that for me, the consistent sleep schedule always feels better than trying to sleep in. Of course there is the occasional exception when I just need to crash. These are the days I don’t even remember turning off the alarm.

This is great because on weekdays I have something of an early-in early-out schedule, and weekends I can either have a super productive morning or I can “reward” myself by using that time to relax or game.

Eat breakfast

I can't believe people get by without this! Waking up early means if I haven't eaten yet my stomach has become a commercial vacuum cleaner by 9:00 AM.

Use the commute to listen to audiobooks and podcasts as much as possible

Sometimes you just need to hit reset with some good music, but I found that by this simple habit I was able to hit book goals I never could otherwise. (I got through the entirety of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Silmarillion in less than 6 months, and I guess I'm sharing that because I don't regret it.)

My podcast rotation right now is heavily TechStuff and Hanselminutes, with a mix of Cyber Security Weekly Podcast and 99% Invisible. I love the variety this gives to my day, as well as the connectivity I feel to things I would otherwise never hear about.

Read e-books in the bathroom

This is time you will always have, and it adds up. Since making this a regular thing, I’ve read Robert C. Martin’s Clean Code and The Clean Coder (both are must reads in this community!) and half of the GoF Design patterns book.

Keep trying new things

This list isn’t exhaustive, but these things keep me consistent and always learning. Some of these may have made you shudder. I acknowledge these aren't for everybody, but they've shaped me into who I am today.

How much time, attention, and effort you invest in something will determine how much you gain; whether in physical results, understanding, or building of character. This is also how you fundamentally recognize your priorities, and how you evaluate what they should be.

With your own habits, decide what you want most. If something is a priority, you can give it your time without any guilt or regret. Always be willing to try new things, and when something works, stick with it.

Habits are the quirks that form around our priorities. What are yours?