Visual Studio Background Customizer

Allows users to customize the Visual Studio 2010 background.

There were a couple of reports of default Visual Studio's background flickering on LCD monitors because of the texture it uses. While I suspect those problems are caused by video card drivers and/or the monitors not supoprting properly the vertical refresh rate, I decided to implement this extension that will allow users to customize or replace the default Visual Studio's background texture.

Another situation where customizing the background may come in handy is for distinguishing easier between the running instances of Visual Studio and the Visual Studio Experimental (if you're using Visual Studio SDK to create your own pacakges/extensions).

With this extension you will be able to :

• use your own image for the background, either tiled or not.
• use a solid color texture for background
• use a transparent/empty texture for a gradient background
• use one of the pre-defined textures or create your own texture

You can use this tool in combination with the Color Theme Editor extension. To change the colors used by the main window's background, search the list of colors for "EnvironmentBackground".

One you install the tool, the Background Customization dialog can be invoked via a menu item in Tools menu.

Note that background texture and gradients are by default disabled in Terminal Services sessions. To enable them, you need to use the Tools/Options dialog and uncheck in the Environment/General panel the "Automatically adjust visual experience based on the client performance" option, and check instead "Enable rich client visual experience"