VS2008 Color Scheme for SQL 2005 Management Studio Express

Yesterday, I have no choice but to reformat my hard disk on my laptop due to the slowness of it! I did every possible performance increase on my machine but with no luck! So I did backup all my files that resides on my drive C before I finally reformatted my Windows XP OS. Lucky for me as I have already created an image or a ghost image of my machine, loaded with all the drivers for my ASUS laptop but no installed development tools and applications.

After recovering my OS and finished installing all necessary applications needed for my work and for my pleasure, I installed Visual Studio 2008 and applied coloring scheme named VibrantInk_V2 by Rob Conery, I really, really like the color combination of this scheme and the black background color makes it easy to read codes rather than the default white color.

As I am happy with the look and feel of my IDE, I wonder if it’s possible to apply such color scheme to SQL Management Studio Express too. So I googled if there’s one out there that already made some schemes and found this link on how I can apply the current scheme of my IDE to SMSE. I immediately download his tool and compiled it to my VS2008. While running the console application, it gave an error message as shown below:

What went wrong? So I read his codes and open the registry to compare the hard-coded registry path, found out that the destination key is not existing on my Registry.

   1: private const string DST_KEY = @”Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Shell\FontAndColors\{A27B4E24-A735-4D1D-B8E7-9716E1E3D8E0}”;

and so, I changed the value to:

   1: private const string DST_KEY = @”Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\ShellSEM\FontAndColors\{A27B4E24-A735-4D1D-B8E7-9716E1E3D8E0}”;

to reflect the registry path on my machine. The only difference of the two is the Shell replaced with ShellSEM.

After recompiling the console application,

Voila! It worked pretty well for me. Try it on your dev tool now!