@Anon - with all due respect to your position on this, I think you're missing our/the point. This is part of a larger rejection of the direction Microsoft has taken. There's serious work going on in many industries to improve the availability and the security of data. No one I have ever been in contact with said "hey I think the Windows desktop stinks, wouldn’t it be great if they would deprecate 4 decades of hard work and change it into a consumer oriented toy”?

I work in health care. Our top concerns are security and data integrity. Touch screen operating systems are not on the list. As a matter of fact, the more changes they make the more vulnerable your data becomes due to unknown security issues and the inherent lack of familiarity with the operation of a new OS. The changes they are making to their eco-system are not trivial – nor are they popular.

The developer community was very actively involved in this recent tools release. We applauded almost everything they were doing until we saw the new interface. This thread represents the development community’s response to the change.

What you really should be upset about is the company who makes the tools you use every day to earn a living is not listening to you. They asked for feedback and ignored it. Where does this end? How far are they willing to take this and what impact will it have on your ability to provide for yourself?

It’s up to you, but personally I would pay more attention the lack of concern for the development community who helped build Microsoft.

As a longtime developer all I can say is wow. I've invested 25 years in learning and promoting the use of your products and managed to build a career for myself. Why? Because you had a successful business image and Exec's were comfortable with me using your products. I followed your design cues and produced applications that solved business problems i.e. we put some serious money on the table with good custom software. It looks good and it works even better.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - there's real work to do out here. Giving serious development tools a modern or metro interface treatment is not necessary. It's a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. We need elegant development tools that are aligned with how we work today and are not being mocked by the entire user community as consumer oriented toys. Whatever your goals were with the desktop - it hasn't exactly been a hit.

VS2012 needs the VS2010 skin and icons. The Windows desktop needs Aero, the Start Button and the Start Menu. Why? Because we need a consistent development platform to innovate and move technology forward. Out here in the real world it takes time and by extension money to change things. You're not helping us at all by giving the development tools a consumer interface treatment. Stability is everything. I see it. My customers see it. Why don't you?

To be more specific, I think Microsoft products running on a Microsoft operating system should support the features of the given operating system.

In other words - VS 2012 running on Windows 7 should support Aero and the other visual features.

@Chris - no problem. For me personally this is more of a “what the...” moment than hate for 2012 - VS 2012 has good bones and poor skin. It's beautiful on the inside. I personally don’t care for the new (old) look and think a return to the 2010 skin would be a better and more visually compatible solution.

I don't know if this is true or not but I stumbled across this doing some research on whether or not we should actually consider switching platforms.

http://windows9info.com/windows-blue/item/anonymous-source-start-button-as-an-option-on-windows-blue

Microsoft, if this is true make sure you keep Aero and put the chrome back into Visual Studio i.e. give us an option for the 2010 interface. There's still quite a few business application developers out here and there's no demand for Metro apps. I recognize and appreciate what you're trying to do and I have some empathy but honestly you were warned when you asked everyone what we thought of this.

One other thing just in case someone is actually paying attention to this. Your font technology is not working well. Could we please clean this up or at the very least put an option in there to not use it. I strip it out of Win 7, pick a nice True Type font and everything looks better... well everything except your browser. Why do this?

There's over 111K downloads of the theme editor. I see the proliferation of Metro to MSDN and Blog content. Buttons and navigation targets the size of my mouse, barely contrasting colors selected for text, confusing layouts...

How does the primary creator of so many things cool on the web fall so far? The principles responsible for the mess are leaving or being asked to clean out their desks. A person could be forgiven for thinking the desktop has taken the hit it has over ego's and personal agenda.

And so here we are with the... the... mess.

Not happy.

Is Microsoft going to give us an option to switch the IDE back to 2010 mode? You started development with the 2010 shell so it should be possible. The Theme Editor is very helpful and hats off to the guys who wrote it. Seriously, thanks. The thing is, it's just not going to cover everything. Running an expensive development environment all patched up to correct visuals is really rather silly. I started using Microsoft products years ago so I wouldn't have to do this. Ever.

In all fairness to those of us in the community who don't like your interpretation of "Metro", we did voice our opinions early. You knew we didn't like it and you persisted. 40,000 downloads (and counting) of the Theme Editor makes quite a statement.

I'm going to get 2012 forced in front of me pretty soon and while I look forward to the internal changes I'm not looking forward to the visual experience. I work with this interface 8 hours a day, 5 days week. THEN I write for myself. It's a lot of time in front of a piece of software.

Without anything else to distract you from my message - I would like to have an option to revert the entire 2012 shell back to 2010. There's no good earthly reason for it to look the way it does and I for one am happy with whole Win7/Aero desktop computing experience along with the applications that were designed for it.

Yeah, I know so keep using it - nobody is stopping you. That's fine but once the team here starts developing with 2012 the choice to use 2010 will not be there.

When running VS 2012 on Windows 7 it is not recognizing Aero settings. While not exactly a color problem, I do use transparency and would like to see it recognized by the application.

Thanks for the color editor, it does help but are we working on a solution for the icons?