Is it possible to change icons in Visual Studio 2012? - icons

Is there any way to replace VS2012 solution explorer's icons with VS2010 ones? At least 'folder' icon :(

Here is a shot of my VS2012 install that almost looks like the familiar 2010 we are all used to. It makes me feel normal again!
Here is exactly how I did this, step-by-step:
1) Close all instances of Visual Studio
2) Download vsip and extract it to a temp directory. (as of 1/3/2013 the current version is 1.5.2)
3) Open up a command prompt with "Run as administrator"
4) Go to the temp directory and run VSIP.exe - This will run an interactive program that accepts commands.
4a) Type "backup --version=2012" - This will backup all of your VS2012 UI dlls, just in case something gets messed up and you want to uninstall VSIP.
4b) Type "extract" - This will extract all of the old icons from your installation of VS2010 (per VS2010 license VSIP can not distribute those icons so we have to have a local install to pull them from).
4c) Type "inject" - This will inject all of the old 2010 icons from the previous step into the VS2012 DLLs.
4d) Type "menus -n" - This will change the menus so they are NOT ALL CAPITALIZED!
5) Download and install NiceVS - do not download the one dated 10/14 or you will be missing icons. As of 1/3/2013 I downloaded the file named "NiceVS.0.8.1.1 Beta.Full.vsix".
6) Download and install VS2012 Color Theme Editor - The next time you start VS2012 select the "Blue" theme from the color select window.
Now you should have a nice install of VS2012 that looks like my screen shot above! It takes three different applications to patch that hideous UI but it's certainly workable now! If you don't have VS2010 installed on the same machine as VS2012 then you will have to run step 4b on a machine with VS2010 and then copy the VSIP Images directory to your 2012 development machine.
Update: If you install "VS 2012 Update 1" after running these steps you will need to re-run step 4c from the VSIP admin prompt (or all of step 4 if you didn't keep the extract of the VS2010 images). The file menu icons and color scheme stay as they are but the update reverts the icons in the solution explorer back to the ugly ones. Re-running the VSIP inject fixes it right up!

Short Answer:
Hack the old icons into 2012.
Visual Studio Icon Patcher - http://vsip.codeplex.com
Long Answer:
Doing this with a plugin, for now, is out of the question. I've been unable to find any built-in way to achieve this and the switch to WPF makes it even harder to hack around.
This app simply extracts the image resources from the unmanaged DLLs in Visual Studio 2010 and injects them into the DLLs for Visual Studio 2012. The managed resources are a lot more complex and haven't been added in yet, though I have gotten some to work.
The initial release didn't work well with themes that had a dark Tree View background color due to how the icon colors are inverted when a dark background color is detected. This is made even worse in the newest release since menu & toolbar icons are included now. I'm running this with the Blue Theme and it looks fine.
One way to hack around the icon inversion is to edit all the extracted images to add a single cyan pixel in the top right corner of each icon in the image map. This will exclude them from the inversion process. I haven't tried this though because I ran into issues early on when manipulating the images where they wouldn't display right. You could try it but it'll be fairly manual and time consuming and may not even work.

Look at this thread:
Solution Explorer - custom icons for my folders
I think it's also applicable for vs2012
If not -> you can manually find solution explorer's icon resources with ResHack (or Resource Hacker) and simply replace it!

Here is the solution:
Visual Studio Icon Patcher http://vsip.codeplex.com/
Description from VSIP web page:
Project Description Visual Studio Icon Patcher allows you to update
Visual Studio 2012 with the icons from Visual Studio 2010.
Until someone can find a way to change the icons via a plug-in the
only way to change them is through resource patching the DLLs that
Visual Studio uses. There are a number of managed and unmanaged DLLs
containing Bitmaps and PNGs that are used to style the application.
For now only the unmanaged DLLs are part of this process with the
managed DLLs hopefully coming soon.
No images are distributed with this project. You will need to have
both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 installed to use this.
Update
I've just tested VSIP with Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, and it work flawlessly :-)

Related

Visual Studio 2015 CSS Intellisense Broken

Editing cshtml files, I'm used to getting Bootstrap intellisense, regardless of what classes I've already used in said file, like so:
Originally, I thought it was just Bootstrap intellisense, but it appears that this is affecting all CSS for my new project. I can link to the CSS files, directly reference the layout file, it doesn't matter. The Bootstrap and other CSS classes do not show, unless I've already used them in the same file:
I've tried to minimize the differences between the two projects, but to no avail. They are on different machines, in different solutions, but everything else is virtually exactly the same. Here's what I've checked/tried so far.
Delete the project, re-add it.
Remove the Bootstrap Nuget package re-add it
Remove the Bootstrap Snippet Pack, Glyphfriend, Web Essentials 2015.2 extensions, re-add them.
Delete the bin and obj folders, build, clean, rebuild, close/reopen VS, restart Windows.
Deleted this folder to allow for recreation: C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\ComponentModelCache
Both machines are running VS 2015 Update 2.
Both projects are MVC 5.
Installed all updates possible in Nuget Package Manager
Known differences
- The machine it works on is running Windows 7, the machine it doesn't is running Windows 10.
I've run into this problem again and found a solution! I'm not sure if it's the same as the original problem I had, but here's the fix anyway.
If the solution has a SQL project (.dbproj), unload it (right click > unload project). There's some weird bug in VS2015 with Bootstrap and SQL database projects that make intellisense for Bootstrap stop working.
In order to get "Class" IntelliSense in VS 2015, try this method. It works for me as follows:
Ex: Right click on any .aspx file in "Solution Explorer" of VS then select "Open With" option then from the list select "HTML Editor" option. Now try to check.
Thanks
Ali

Visual Studio 2013 has stopped updating aspx.designer.cs files

I'm working on a large-ish web forms application and VS has stopped updating .aspx.designer.cs files in the last few days.
It seemed like the designer updates initially became flaky (sometimes update, sometimes not) then stopped updating altogether. Now I have to manually edit the designer file after adding a control to a page before I can compile.
I've searched and tried all the suggestions like switching from markup to design view and back etc - no change. The only thing that kind of works is this but even then the generated designer file often doesn't contain references to all the controls on the page. And also that only works on a per-file basis. Ideally I would like the whole project to update/generate designer files correctly again.
I've tried cleaning the solution - no change.
VS details:
Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2013
Version 12.0.40629.00 Update 5
Microsoft .NET Framework Version 4.6.00079
Installed Version: Professional
Any suggestions appreciated - thanks.
Make sure you're not running the application/site while adding controls. I've noticed that VS will lock the designer files while in debug mode and doesn't sync up when you exit debug mode.
Also, your link is broken, doesn't point to anything so I can't see what you were referencing to.
I think what caused this was a somewhat flaky local install of the project from TFS. It compiled but still had red squiggly lines under a few namespaces at design time. Once the project references were all clean the designer files were also updating correctly.

Visual Studio 2010 randomly expands collapsed sections

My question is simply, is there a hotfix that will repair the bug which randomly expands collapsed sections in an aspx page after a few seconds. Once I re-collapse them it no longer collapses them, until I close the page and reopen it.
I'm running VS2010 vanilla (no service pack).
Thanks.
ctrl+m, ctrl+s just collapse the current region. in java script you can use this extension and tools. but I think you need to a custom command, take a look at this:
How to add commands to Visual Studio 2012?
and for more information about more shortcuts in visual studio, check out this answer:
Visual Studio, Collapse/Extends Regions ONLY shortcut

Website running .NET 3.5 cannot use feature not part of ISO-2 specs

I am getting this error a lot:
Feature '{insert feature here}' cannot be used because it is not part of the
ISO-2 C# language specification
I am working on a .NET 3.5 website that I've worked on on and off for about two years. I've never seen this error before my most recent around of updates. I'm using a decent amount of LINQ coding throughout and I get these errors related to much of the LINQ code. Based on what I've read it seems like even though I'm using .NET 3.5, for some reason it thinks I'm using 2.0. But I can't find anything that says how to fix it.
One example of a problem is that if I try to add a new item to the App_Code directory, I do not get the option to add a LINQ to SQL dbml file.
If anyone can shed some light on how exactly I would fix this, I would much appreciate it.
I was unable to locate an "Advanced" option under the build tab. I have a feeling it is probably because it is a web app. I looked through the web.config and found 2 parts that may be important. Most things referenced 3.5.0.0 or v3.5. The settings are consistent with older backups of the web.config from when there were no errors. By the way, only intellisense and things within VS2010 are giving me problems. The website is running error free.
I have completed a total uninstall and re-install of VS2010 and I'm still having the same issue. I fired up my old install of VS2008 and I am NOT having this issue there. However, I would MUCH prefer to use VS2010 on this project.
I opened the website in VS2010 on my work computer, and there are no errors reported. This is making me think that there is something on my laptop that is causing the problem. As I noted above, I completely reinstalled Visual Studio 2010 and I am still having the problem. What does this leave? I have only one extension installed in VS, and it's the same one at work and on my laptop. Also, I did not reinstall the extension after reinstalling VS, and the problem persists.
Both PC's run Win7 Ultimate. Have VS2008 and VS2010 installed. VS2010 has the same extension installed on both. On my laptop I have the full version of SQL Server 2008 installed, but only the Management Studio on my desktop (we have a server in the office). Would SS2008 have anything to do with it?
Go to your project properties, the Build tab, Advanced - that should allow you to set which version of C# you want to use. It should default to the latest version supported by the version of Visual Studio you're using, but it sounds like at some point you've switched it to ISO-2.
(That's certainly true for Windows projects and class libraries - there may be a different location in a web app. In particular, have a look in Web.config.)
If this has only started happening recently, I'd have a look through your source control history at changes to any configuration files. Also try creating a new project of the same type, and see if that has the same problem.
Jon Skeet's answer is mostly correct. The location for the update is in the "Property Pages" which I got to by right-clicking on the name of the website, clicking Property Pages, the Build item, then target framework.
The extension I use, Solution Navigator, has it's own heading for the solution. Right-clicking on it DOES NOT give me the Property Pages option. By chance I right clicked on the title of the website under the solution heading and was presented with the Property Pages option. In there was the Build tab which contained the target framework option.
Once I finally found the target framework option, it was indeed set to .NET 2.0 for some reason. I changed it to 3.5, reloaded the solution, and now it works great.
Thanks a million Jon for your help and time working with me!!

How can I disable the annoying clicking sounds in Aptana Studio 3?

I'm using PyDev within Apatana Studio 3, and I noticed whenever files are updated in the project directory (ie. when the package explorer is refreshed), there is an annoying virtual clicking sound. Since my project is generating files rather slowly, I get several clicking sounds each time I debug it.
So, how can I disable it?
This is probably related to Eclipse and not really Aptana Studio 3 (so, take a look at: How to turn off the beep sound in Eclipse?)

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