When writing Niah Text Filter, I really wanted to have the tool window appear as much like a Visual Studio window as possible. At times, I found it incredibly difficult to find the correct EnvironmentColors value. At a minimum, the correct color value should work across the default/provided Visual Studio themes. So, I wrote a little application to help me figure out the right value, which I’ve made available here:

Download EnvironmentColorsFinder.exe version 1.0.0.0

To use it, you specify the RGB color value that you want, and the application will display the most likely EnvironmentColors candidates. To get the most accurate candidates, you can provide the color you want to display per theme (dark, regular, blue) – this is easy to achieve if you take a screenshot of a sample Visual Studio UI element in each theme, and color drop the pixel you need. A picture is worth a thousand words:

It helped me match my tool window to Visual Studio reasonably well:

I hope it helps others too!

Please note that it’s provided as-is with no warranty. Feel free to contact me about it, but I can’t guarantee what level of support I’ll provide, since it’s really a quick and dirty little app I hacked together 🙂