Since my laptop has several software issues that will require a fresh installation at some point in the near future, I decided to install VS 11 Beta side by side with VS 2010, and one thing that I noticed the other day was that my MZ-Tools add-in, when loaded in VS 2010, was showing gray pictures (rather than color pictures) for controls of the System.Windows.Forms namespace in some of its features.

Yesterday I decided to investigate the glitch and I noticed that the Document Outline built-in toolwindow of VS 2010 was also affected. Since my add-in gets the icons from the embedded resources of the System.Windows.Forms library, calling type.Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(type, type.Name & “.bmp”), I used .NET Reflector to examine the resources and certainly it seems that VS 11 Beta installs a new version of System.Windows.Forms 4.0.0.0 that uses the new awful gray icons for controls, while the original System.Windows.Forms 4.0.0.0 of VS 2010 used colored icons. This seems to be a case of breaking the look & feel backwards compatibility of a product 😉

I reported it to Microsoft last night. You can see the attached image in the bug report to know what I mean:

Document Outline toolwindow of VS 2010 shows icons of VS 11 Beta (gray)
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/735124/document-outline-toolwindow-of-vs-2010-shows-icons-of-vs-11-beta-gray#details

So, not only the new developer experience of VS 11 is the most hated feature, it also affects some features of VS 2010 and 3rd party extensions for that IDE when VS 11 Beta is installed side by side. And AFAIK, Microsoft continues to be silent about the future of the new look and feel introduced by VS 11 Beta, despite the huge negative response of the community of VS developers.