Search

The first post in the theme can be found here. If you haven't done much styling of controls before then I recommend you start there since it introduces practices to keep your styles manageable.
This far in the series, I'm focusing on specific parts of the more complex controls.
In this post, we are branching out into the Silverlight Toolkit to style the Accordian control.

The feedback from the Silverlight 4 application themes released and the latest in process have been overwhelmingly toward the positive.  We appreciate the feedback and hopefully you appreciate the transparency in the process.  As a developer I want my fellow brethren to appreciate good design and use it whenever possible … even as a default if you don’t have designers on board.

We’re turning this theme around FAST and I wanted to throw it out here in an initial iteration for preview and comment.  This is the ‘dark’ version of the theme and there will be a light version as well.  This represents only the core control set, but like the others will include other SDK controls as well.

It’s been a while since Silverlight Toolkit has Theming support, but with the April 2010 version and the new features of Silverlight 4 it is now easier than ever to apply those themes.

What you need to know:

• ImplicitStyleManager was removed from the Toolkit, this is because implicit styles are now supported in Silverlight 4.
• The Toolkit has now a Theme control to apply Themes on your pages.
• Also a ContextMenuService and ContextMenu control that can allow the user to switch Themes at runtime in this scenario.

The ContentControl is often overlooked when building Silverlight apps. It’s used inside many controls such as the Button or ChildWindow, but it also turns out to be quite useful on it’s own for separating content from presentation.

This morning we published the final release of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio and WCF RIA Services.  In April, when Silverlight 4 was released, the tools were still in “RC” status.  Today, they are no longer and are officially released.  There is no new update to Silverlight itself, but these tools are the final bits of this version.

This is the 6th in a series on creating a "Chrome and Glass" Silverlight theme in Expression Blend. The purpose of the theme is to look at all the common controls and point out any interesting or difficult aspects of styling their templates. If you haven't styled many controls before then I recommend you begin with the first post in the series.

A while back I posted a sneak peek preview of 3 new themes that we were working on for Silverlight 4 applications. Our team wanted to do more than just the overall base theme and provide the themes for the core, SDK and some Silverlight Toolkit controls as well.  In addition, there was a lot of internal chatter about how cool these new themes were and a lot of teams wanting to adopt them as default, including WCF RIA Services.