Many people requested it and in the next Version of Xamarin Studio it will become a reality:
The Visual Studio color importer !
Defining own color schemes is very painful it is much easier to use a pre defined scheme from Studio Styles. Now it is easy to do as well importing a visual studio color scheme. Now finally what once has been an April's fool joke can now become a reality:
You surely want such a pretty user interface for the IDE yourself and ask how to achieve this. It's easy to do see the little demo video I made to demonstrate how to import a color scheme (recorded on my linux desktop):
This feature is already pushed to the monodevelop git repository. In case you want to try it out you have to built MonoDevelop from the source. The Xamarin Studio users need to wait a bit longer we release a new version when it's ready.
We import all C#/HTML/XML/ASP.NET colors as well as some colors not defined by Studio Styles. It required some changes to our color scheme system which means that old scheme files are broken again. But I promise that it will be more stable in the future. The new format supports versioning and it's easier to extend it with new colors. The new color scheme system uses json to store the color schemes. Newer versions will be able to load old style files without breaking.
Visual Studio .NET schemes are imported on the fly and remain in the VS.NET format. This way improvements to the importer engine directly benefit previous imported color schemes. However when the user changes them in our scheme editor the format will get converted.
I would appreciate if I would get some feedback about this feature. I want it as perfect as possible.
