Visual Studio - Use a theme with Windows high contrast

When you set Windows in a high contrast theme, Visual Studio follows suit, adapts the same colors, and does not allow you to pick another theme anymore. To make matters worse, it shows all the code in the same color; orange in my case. You could customize it, and set all the colors yourself, but that's a lot of work. There is a registry trick however, to fool the IDE and use a theme anyway. I did this for Visual Studio 2013, but it should work in 2012 and probably other versions as well.

• So open up RegEdit and navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config\Themes. If you use VS 2012, that would be 11.0_Config.
• You see a list of GUID's there. When you click one, you can see the theme's name. Select the theme you want, right-click it's key and export it.
• {a5c004b4-2d4b-494e-bf01-45fc492522c7} is the high contrast theme. Rename the key to the GUID of the theme you want after renaming that theme first. I simply swapped there names.
• Finally, choose File > Import, and import the .reg file you just exported.
• Now if you open Visual Studio, it should be using your theme.