Have you already created a beautiful theme directly in Visual Studio? You have my respect and my sympathy—that’s more pain than any developer should have to experience.

Now some good news—if you want to get your theme onto Studio Styles, you won’t have to do even more work by copying colors in by hand. There’s a new import function to do that for you—because hey, what are computers for if not repetitive, boring tasks.

Look for the “Import .vssettings” button down the bottom of the screen when you’re creating or editing a color scheme. Paste in the XML that you exported from Visual Studio (Tools > Import and Export Settings > Export selected environment settings) and your theme is now studiostylified.

This button only imports the colors that Studio Styles supports—if you’ve exported your VB colors, keyboard shortcuts or bank account details they’ll just be ignored.

This news comes a bit too late for Damien Guard and others who have spent time importing their themes by hand. But for everyone going forward—if you’ve tweaked your theme in Visual Studio and you want to re-import the changes, it should be a lot easier.

If you run into any problems, please let me know.