Color Schemes in SQL 2005 Management Studio
As many of you know, I spend time every now and then coming up with new color schemes for Visual Studio 2005. It's fun, and having a good color scheme can make all the difference in the world to your eyes when spending long times in front of your screen writing code.
I use dark backgrounds, so it was always painful to switch to SQL Server 2005 Management Studio to write SQL code, because I had not configured a custom color scheme there. I also didn't want to have to spend more time doing so, particularly since Management Studio has no Import/Export Settings wizard.
Enter VSColorsToSql
This is a simple utility I wrote last night that will port your current VS2005 Fonts And Colors Settings (just for the code editor, mind you) to Management Studio. It's nothing fancy, so all it does is copy some registry settings around. Here's my current scheme:
It does make some assumptions and and a few changes: Turns out the SQL and XML editors in VS use different settings than the corresponding ones in Management Studio! Hopefully, the mappings I selected will give you something usable as well.
Just to be on the safe side, you can export your existing Management Studio settings by backing up this registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\
Tools\Shell\FontAndColors\{A27B4E24-A735-4D1D-B8E7-9716E1E3D8E0}
You can download the code from here.







Cool, look forward to trying this back in the office tomorrow.
[)amien
Thanx
Took me some time to convert this to VB .Net, and figure out a way to make it work between VS 2008 and SSMS 2008… But it was well worth it! Many thanks.
Pradeep, can you share?
Just change the registry values to the following for Visual Studio 2008 -> SSMS 2008
SRC_KEY = @”Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\FontAndColors\{A27B4E24-A735-4D1D-B8E7-9716E1E3D8E0}”;
DST_KEY = @”Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Shell\FontAndColors\{A27B4E24-A735-4D1D-B8E7-9716E1E3D8E0}”;
Thanks to Tomas for this handy tool!
[...] after a little digging on google I managed to find this post by Tomas Restrepo where he had actually written a tool to import the registry settings from [...]
Thanks a lot man!