Visual studio used to have a kick *** interface. However, everything about the 2012 interface looks.. amateurish.

-The icon looks like something a 3 year old did.

-The lack of depth makes the whole thing jump into my face.

-The upper cased menus are screaming at me (try posting on a forum in all caps... see what the response is).

In a nutshell, whoever designed the interface needs to go back to the grade school I'm sure they dropped out of and finish their education. Maybe get a job at a fast food place running a cash register... Because they have zero talent for making a good looking UI.

We have incredibly high resolution monitors that can render beautiful images. To go all grey (or black) is such a step backwards that I can not believe this really passed user testing.

You'll notice that iPhones went from this type of boring UI and changed to using high res displays with lots of good color. You should have also noticed that this was exactly what people wanted.. and they sold like hotcakes.

In the old days people scrambled to get color monitors just to get away from the ho-hum grayness of working with a machine all day. To send us backwards is irritating at best and abusive at worst.

Please, make Visual Studio look good again.

I don't care about metro, or whatever your calling it these days. I figure it'll take 3 years for you to figure out what a mistake that is and fix it. In the meantime, let me keep the Win7 look.

Note, I wouldn't post anything if I didn't care. I do. I want to use the best. This, well, isn't. It's not even a "good effort". Instead, it looks like something that was slapped together at the last minute.

The icons in the Solution Explorer has a very important purpose and function. And I'm (along with half of the world, it seems) not very pleased to see that this UX functionality was abandoned during this recent redesign.

The ability to differentiate files from folders.

This is the most important information that those icons has to provide the user with. By far. And there are three facts that prevents the "Hey, I'm a folder"-information from getting to the user:
1) The icon shape does not look like a classic folder (although an esoteric, modern one)
2) The icon is black (folders tend to have a yellow tan - especially after sunny days)
3) The icon for an opened folder is not resembling anything a human is used to interacting with

I've given the RTM a fair chance, and I like it a lot. But when working with large solutions, there is no chance in [insert hot place here] that my brain can scan and identify the file I'm looking for.

I'm sure that improvements could be made to several icons, but the file/folder issue is the most important one. So please have another shot at the icons and see what you can come up with for SP1.

Best Regards,
Simeon

I like to use a dark background when I program, but sometimes the foreground colors get difficult to read. So, I go into the Colors Settings but there are a million things in there and figuring out which one to tweak is a long process.

I'd love to be able to highlight the piece of text that is showing up brown and right-click on it and be able to go straight to the color setting that is making it that color. Or show the three settings that are affecting that text's color....

Right now, it is too hard and makes changing color themes difficult.

As the feedback to the VS11 beta screenshots demonstrated, many developers are passionate about the feel of the IDE they use. It is probably a given that no one style will make everybody happy.

However, there's a solution - allow loadable, shareable themes. While VS2010 has this to some extent with the theme editor addin, there are many aspects of the UI that are not stylable.

The UI for VisualStudio should support alterations to all visual aspects through some method. While support for theme creating, editing, importing, and exporting would be appreciated, full themability exposed via an API would allow this niche to be filled via an addin.

Note that any aspect of the UI that can not be recolored or redrawn via a theme will detract from the usefullness of styling (for example, the text editor window scrollbars in visual studio 2010)

I attached a file with a mockup of what I'm describing in this suggestion.

In the image I mocked up the Solution Explorer.

- Title: lowercase
- Title: Segoe UI Light
- Title: gray, lower contrast (means you don't have to focus on the fact that it's the Solution Explorer). Take it for granted at some point, and let it relax into the background.

- Window Background is the same dark gray as everywhere else. This lets the files in the solution pop a bit more, but in a nice minimalist way. This also creates a lot of breathable space around the solution items.
- Icon Colors: chose some very soft low contrast colors, just enough to differentiate at a glance, but didn't flat out create new icons.

- Removed top bar of icons. Jam them into a submenu. The reality is that we have so many buttons to click, and most of them only really need to be clicked once.

- Didn't change in the mockup, but the scrollbars should be darkened by a lot. It's currently the brightest thing on the screen in dark mode!

Most of these thoughts can be applied to everywhere else in the IDE.

Much as I love ADO.Net Entity Data Model Designer (VS2010), one feature is making me INSANE.

When initially putting together a complex data model, it's perfectly fine (and desirable) that Designer figures out on its own where the lines delineating associations are placed. However, eventually, I wind up meticulously placing those lines myself for the sake of readability.

But if I finish my painstaking layout, and then decide to, say, add a property to an existing entity, Designer redoes my entire layout, or at least every association line that leads to or from that entity.

It's the definition of frustrating. I find myself trying to manually edit the design portion of the XML to undo some amount of the crazy changes; sometimes it works, sometimes I have to redo the whole thing manually.

Simply setting a preference to disable auto-layout, perhaps excepting the specific association being created (if you're creating a new association), would be a dream come true.