If you're like me and cling to Office 2010 but find the Windows-generated tile background colours distracting or too bright, you can customise the colours using a simple trick so they look like the screenshot below. Note you can change the background colour to anything you want, and also override the icon images too.

Here's how:

1. Create a new folder somewhere, such as your desktop.
2. Create a new empty XML file (e.g. New > New Text Document then change the filename extension to .xml)
3. Rename the file to winword.visualelementsmanifest.xml (don't forget to uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types" in Folder Optjons!).
4. Open the file in Notepad or another text editor
5. Paste this into the file:

   <Application xmlns:xsi="www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
       <VisualElements
           BackgroundColor="#323232"
           ShowNameOnSquare150x150Logo="on"
           ForegroundText="light"/>
   </Application>
   

6. Save and close the file.
7. Duplicate (copy and paste) the file for each Office program shortcut and rename them according to this list:
   • communicator.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Lync)
   • excel.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Excel)
   • infopath.visualelementsmanifest.xml (InfoPath Designer and Filler)
   • msaccess.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Access)
   • mspub.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Publisher)
   • onenote.visualelementsmanifest.xml (OneNote)
   • outlook.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Outlook)
   • powerpnt.visualelementsmanifest.xml (PowerPoint)
   • visio.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Visio)
   • winproj.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Project)
   • winword.visualelementsmanifest.xml (Word)
8. Cut and paste all of these files into your Office14 folder where the Office .exe files are. This will be a location similar to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14 (or "Program Files (x86)"). For Lync, the folder is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Lync rather than Office14.
9. Your Start Screen tiles won't look any different yet - you still need to trigger a tile cache invalidation. This is done by altering the "Date Modified" timestamps on the .lnk files. Follow these steps:
   1. In your Start Screen, right-click an Office tile and choose "Open file location", this will open a folder full of shortcuts to Office programs.
   2. Open an Administrative Command Prompt (File Explorer > File > Open Command Prompt > Open Command Prompt as Administrator). Accept the UAC prompt.
   3. In this elevated command prompt, run this command:

      for %f in (*.*) do copy /b "%f" +,,

      (don't forget both commas! This command updates the Date Modified timestamp on each file)
10. Open the Start Screen and wait a few seconds and as if by magic, the tile appearances will be refreshed with your new background colour!

This works for any Start Menu shortcut to an .exe file - shortcuts to other files (e.g. *.mmc files) don't work. You can use the technique on games, like Minecraft where the bright orange background burns my retinas.

The schema for the VisualElementsManifest.xml files is accessible on MSDN here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/dn393983.aspx. You also might want to consider renaming the shortcuts for brevity, I renamed "Microsoft Office Word 2010" to just "Word".

You can use any hexadecimal RGB color for the BackgroundColor attribute (prefix it with a '#' character). Windows will generate a subtle horizontal gradient effect with the color.

Note that this does not work for certain programs like Firefox which has special behaviour (Windows handles web-browsers differently) the same applies to Chrome and Internet Explorer as well.

Enjoy!

Windows comes with two flavours of bootloader: one for BIOS systems, and a different loader for UEFI systems. The two bootloaders look alike, but can be told-apart because the UEFI bootloader presents "Boot from Device" as one of the root menu options.

Previously, everyone on my team using VHD Native Boot were using Windows' BIOS-based bootloader. This was simple enough to get working, you simply need to boot into your main Windows installation and run these commands from an elevated command-prompt:

bcdedit /copy {default} /d "Boot from VHD Foobar.vhd"
bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[D:]\VHDs\Foobar.vhd
bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[D:]\VHDs\Foobar.vhd

(where {guid} is the new GUID returned after running the bcdedit /copy command and D:\VHDs\Foobar.vhd is the path to the VHD file you want to boot from)

The above commands will edit the boot configuration file which is stored on the hidden partition on the physical disk.

Our internal tool that I mentioned at the beginning of this posting converted our computers from the BIOS bootloader to the UEFI bootloader. Ordinarily this isn't a problem, in fact it's a benefit as it enables features like Secure Boot and faster boot times. The problem, however, is that the boot configuration entries added by the bcdedit commands above didn't work!

...more precisely, the bcdedit /copy... commands did add entries to the bootloader configuration, whenever a VHD option was selected from the bootmenu the system would reboot, attempt to mount the VHD, then fail - no error messages were displayed on screen or logged to disk, the system would simply restart and display the Windows 8.x bootmenu again.

After some digging around both the public web and our internal websites I discovered an alternative approach to adding a VHD Native Boot option, but curiously the pages that mention it didn't make references to UEFI booting. The technique is such:

1. First, remove any existing VHD Native Boot entries from the bootloader that you might have added with bcdedit by running bcdedit /delete {guid} (where {guid} is the GUID of the VHD entry. Run bcdedit /enum ALL to get a complete list.
2. Mount the VHD or VHDX file by double-clicking on it in Explorer or through Disk Management in Computer Management. The drive letter that the disk is assigned doesn't matter. Let's assume it's K:
3. In an elevated command prompt, run bcdboot K:\Windows (where \Windows is where Windows is installed on the VHD)
4. That's it! - Reboot to the bootloader menu by holding down the Shift key while clicking Restart on the Shutdown menu and the VHD should now appear in the "Another OS" submenu.