VS Theme (.vstheme)

Visual Studio styling based on .vstheme files. Includes built-in VS2015 and VS2022 variants and supports loading custom .vstheme or .vstheme.gz (gzip-compressed) files.

Installation

dotnet add package Dirkster.AvalonDock.Themes.VS

Built-in Variants

VS2022

dockManager.Theme = new VS2022DarkTheme();
dockManager.Theme = new VS2022LightTheme();
dockManager.Theme = new VS2022BlueTheme();

VS2015

dockManager.Theme = new VS2015DarkTheme();
dockManager.Theme = new VS2015LightTheme();
dockManager.Theme = new VS2015BlueTheme();

Loading Custom .vstheme Files

From a File Path

dockManager.Theme = new VsTheme("path/to/custom.vstheme");

From a Stream

using var stream = File.OpenRead("custom.vstheme");
dockManager.Theme = new VsTheme(stream);

The VsTheme constructor auto-detects gzip compression (via magic bytes 0x1F 0x8B), so both plain .vstheme and .vstheme.gz files work with the stream constructor.

From Gzip-Compressed Bytes

For embedded resources stored as .vstheme.gz, load the raw bytes directly:

byte[] gzipBytes = VsThemeResourceLoader.Load(
    Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(),
    "MyApp.Resources.mytheme.vstheme.gz");

dockManager.Theme = new VsTheme(gzipBytes);

From a Pre-Parsed Palette

var palette = VsThemeParser.ParseFile("custom.vstheme");
dockManager.Theme = new VsTheme(palette);

XAML Markup Extension

<DockingManager Theme="{vs:VsTheme Path=vs2015blue.vstheme}" />

The Path can be absolute or relative to the application directory.

Parsing API

VsThemeParser extracts a VsThemeColorPalette from .vstheme files (the Environment category):

Method	Description
`VsThemeParser.Parse(Stream)`	Parse from a stream (auto-detects gzip)
`VsThemeParser.ParseFile(string)`	Parse from a file path
`VsThemeParser.ParseGZip(byte[])`	Parse from gzip-compressed bytes

The returned VsThemeColorPalette provides lookup methods:

var palette = VsThemeParser.ParseFile("mytheme.vstheme");

Color? bg = palette.GetBackground("ToolWindowBackground");
Color fg = palette.GetForegroundOrDefault("ToolWindowText", Colors.White);
bool has = palette.Contains("AccentMedium");