How do I make Visual Studio 2012 colors look like Visual Studio 2010?

I'm not a fan of both the dark and light color themes offered in Visual Studio 2012.

How can I change colors of the title bar, menu bar, tool bars, etc to make them look like the ones in Visual Studio 2010?


Solution 1:

The blue theme has been added back in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, no extensions required.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2797912

enter image description here

Solution 2:

Download and install the Color Theme Editor Extension 2012 which works with VS2012.

(It allows you to apply a predefined theme or customise the theme for yourself - but you can choose the 'Blue' theme for a VS2010 style)

(edit: Or use the 'Blue' theme that is now built into VS2012 as of Update 2)

Solution 3:

I wrote a blog post explaining in detail how to make VS 2012 look like VS 2010 as much as possible. I will summarize it here.

  • Replace the new monochrome icons with the old ones and make the menu icons lowercase.

    For this you need both the 2010 and 2012 versions installed and the Visual Studio Icon Patcher tool. Start the tool (it's a cmd line application) and enter extract, then inject and finally menus.

  • Change the color theme to blue.

    Download the Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor, go to "Tools - Customize Colors" and select the blue theme.

  • Final result:

    enter image description here

    It is not exactly like VS2010 but it gets pretty damn close.