Like me you may be have been frustrated by the lack of colour in VS2012. The flat look, reminicent of the early 'Gem' OS is bad enough, but when the only choices are a washed out white look or the deadly all-black look, it's not an easy product to work with.

Fortunately MS themselves seem to have quietly taken notice of this, or at least one of their developers has, and a 'Color Theme Editor' extension has been released. This comes with some much better colour schemes (I'm using the blue one, which is fairly close to VS2010) and also allows you to create and edit themes youself.

This extension doesn't come up when you search 'Extensions and Updates' but can be found at

http://tinyurl.com/6rhkdej

With this, using VS2012 finally becomes a pleasurable experience.