Sunday, October 30, 2016

No, you are not getting the dark theme for SSMS anytime soon

At the SQL Server chalk talk session the question was asked when SQL Server Management Studio would get a dark theme. This is not an unreasonable question, after all, SQL Server Management Studio is built on top of the Visual Studio shell.

Here is what a light theme looks like in Visual Studio


And here is the same when I apply the dark theme


For me the light theme looks better...but what do I know
So why won't we get the dark theme for SQL Server Management Studio anytime soon?

The person answering the questions said that hears this asked all the time, he sees it on twitter, he sees it on facebook. He actually loves the dark theme in Visual Studio.

So the problem is that there are hundreds and hundreds of dialog boxes, wizards and views in SQL Server Management Studio that are not theme aware, those were written somewhere over the last 10 to 13 years.

They just finished the high DPI fix, that took hundreds if not thousand of code changes in files. So this is just basically a huge funding cost, priority wise it is really tough to justify doing this work, compared to feature requests and bug fixes.

So there you have it.... NO DARK THEME FOR YOU!!!!
at

2 comments:

  1. Unknown10:16 PM

    I would like to know how many are still exclusively using SSMS for TSQL Query development work vs SSDT (which is black ... I went black and never went back)

    Unless I'm doing SQL Admin work I pretty much stick with SSDT for TSQL ... plus it has the hooks for SSRS/SSIS/SSAS development in the same place.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2:45 PM

    You could always make your own SSMS theme. Here's one I found for SSMS 2017. I believe it also works for 2016, but not sure. It worked perfectly for me.

    https://mikesdatawork.wordpress.com/2017/07/07/dark-ssms-theme-ssms-2017/

    I noticed that whenever you download it; it comes as a .doc
    All I did was dropped the .doc extension and loaded it up to my SSMS. Worked perfectly.


    ReplyDelete