VS2010 Editor And Explicit Background Colors

In general terms, I’m liking the Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 experience quite a bit; there are lots of goodies in there. The Text Editor shows a lot of promise, though it’s still a bit on the buggy side .

I’ve noticed something that’s nagging me a bit, and that’s full line highlights when you’ve got elements that have an explicit background set. In my current VS2010 color scheme, I’ve got strings set up so that they will be rendered with a dark green background, different from the almost black, default background color:

If I put a breakpoint on that line, the line will be marked with the usual (default) crimson background. But here’s what happens with the string:

So now the string background is preserved, but the foreground color is set to white. It’s readable (by happy change), but it might also blind you.

Now let’s try debugging and see what happens when that line is the current statement:

Again, the background color is preserved, but now text is black and completely unreadable.

Now, I don’t know if this can be considered a bug or a feature. In general, the VS2010 editor does a much better job of dealing with syntax coloring, and I love that text selection is now semi-translucent and keeps syntax highlighting visible. It’s a simple thing, but it makes the editor much nicer to use.

Given the issues exhibited above, what I really wished happened is that both kinds of line highlighting were handled exactly like text selection: Make the marker a semi-translucent background and don’t force the foreground text color. It’s bound to be rather ugly.