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Source: Active Tuts+

The ability to apply style to user interface elements is something that we’re familiar with from HTML/CSS. Silverlight has some similar mechanisms for applying groups of common properties to parts (or the whole) of your user interface. In this video, we’re going to dive into styling in Silverlight.

We’ll take a brief look at how styles work in Silverlight, how we can apply them either individually or globally and how we often package them into resource collections for re-use and also so that we can swap them dynamically at run time to allow replaceable application “themes”.

Source: Silverlight Scratchpad

Here is the control with a couple of different styles, with some of the dials bound to an items source. I also added an animation for the dial positions being added and removed. You can see this by changing the value of the big dial in the bottom left corner; its value sets the MaxValue of the top left dial.

Source: ScottLogic

This article is part 3 of 4 in a series covering everything that I think is worth knowing about styles in Silverlight. The previous parts of the series are Styles in Silverlight: an Introduction and Styles in Silverlight – Inheritance, Precedence and Other Advanced Topics.

For example, I noticed the following XAML that referenced PhoneTextTitle1Style in one of the Visual Studio project templates:

            <TextBlock x:Name="ListTitle" Text="{Binding LineOne}" Margin="-3,-8,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>

I then wanted to figure out what all the system styles were.  How to do it? Expression Blend!

Karsten Januszewski explored the default styles in Windows Phone 7 tools and posted tips on using them.

I was playing around with the Windows Phone 7 tools and noticed that there are some system styles available for text.  For example, I noticed the following XAML that referenced PhoneTextTitle1Style in one of the Visual Studio project templates:

            <TextBlock x:Name="ListTitle" Text="{Binding LineOne}" Margin="-3,-8,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>

I then wanted to figure out what all the system styles were.  How to do it? Expression Blend!  By going to the Assets tab and then clicking Styles --> System Styles, I was able to see all the styles:

Styles in Silverlight are a powerful mechanism that allow controlling the visual representation of elements in a unified way for all user interface elements. The concept is similar to using CSS to control the look and feel of HTML.

Style properties differ by element type. For example on a TextBlock (a text element) one can style the FontSize, FontFamily, Foreground and lots of other properties. On an Ellipse however none of these properties can be set, on the other hand it does provide for example the Fill property, that the TextBlock does not.

In this first approach, we’ll create the MVVM project as well as the editing form and we’ll populate it with data from an object.  To get started, open Expression Blend 4 (or Visual Studio 2010)  and select MvvmLight (SL4)  Name the project Validation and make sure Language is set to C# (or VB if you are transposing) and the Version is set to 4.0.  Click OK.

Jesse's previous posts you can find here:

• Visual State Manager A-Z
• Styles (followup)
• Templates, Visual State and Fun With Controls
• Teaching An Old Control New Tricks With Templates

Let’s start with the form that is used in my Getting Started With Silverlight video: Adding Controls To An Application.  That video uses the design surface in Visual Studio 2010, and a subsequent video creates the grid in Xaml. To round things out I’ll create this version in Expression Blend.

I’ll begin by opening Blend and creating a new project. I’ll click  in the grid margins to create 5 rows and 2 columns. 

These buttons have gone through many iterations and I’m still not sure I’m quite happy with them just yet, but I’ll cover them anyway since they introduce a few interesting attached properties.