A Tip to Play with RadControls for Silverlight Themes

Monday, December 22, 2008 by Telerik Automated Testing Tools | Comments 3

There are several built-in themes in RadControls for Silverlight that I’m sure the SL developers are pretty interested in. You can easily see how the themed controls look like after building a simple Silverlight application and setting any of the predefined themes. You shouldn’t miss the themes demo that allows applying a theme of the controls by a single button click.

I’d like to give you another tip and at the same time to share something from the Telerik Silverlight kitchen. The tip gives you a chance to get quickly all the controls themed in a complex application containing tens of demos. This is an option the team internally uses to find any glitches of the themes as well.

Are you curious to check it out? Just follow the next simple steps:

  1. Download the RadControls for Silverlight setup if you still don’t have it locally. I suggest you get and install the latest Q3 2008 SP2 release we shipped last week.
  2. Load the Examples solution in Visual Studio. You can use the shortcut from the start menu:

ExamplesSolutionStartMenu

  1. Browse the ExamplesCS project for instance, open the App.Xaml.cs file and set the application theme in the constructor like this:
Telerik.Windows.Controls.Theme.ApplicationTheme = "Telerik.Windows.Themes.Office_Black";  
  1. Run the project to see the desired theme applied to all the Silverlight demos.

You can browse the themes .dll files in the “Binaries/Silverlight” folder to get the names of the themes available currently:

SilverlightThemesDlls

Should you notice any inconsistency in the demos/controls after applying a theme, do not hesitate to help me and the other testers by reporting the issue. ;) The team is constantly working on improving the appearance of the current set of the themes as well as adding a new theme in each official release.

Happy playing!

P.S. You will probably see a drop down with the list of the themes on our live demos' site to change the theme easier in nearest future. As soon as that gets available online, I will update this post.

3  comments

  • ..Ben 22 Dec 2008
    Just a note: If you want to try other Themes, be sure before step 4, to make reference to the dll that's made for that color. Looks like the samples already has Office_Black.dll.
    ..Ben
  • Svetlana 13 Jan 2009
    As I see from your example, some of the controls doesn't change the theme when I tried to change it in the App.xaml.cs as desscribed in your blog. Will Docking control support themes when it will be released? How can I change the styles of the PaneGroups and the docking control? When working with blend I cannot see any template / style of the controls. Also I tried to do that like described there:
    http://www.telerik.com/support/kb/silverlight/general/how-to-edit-radcontrol-s-controltemplate-in-expression-blend.aspx and the link for Project with all the ControlTemplates doesn't work.
    I have to know this info since this is critical for our decision about using Telerik controls in our UI teams for developing the future products.

    Thanks,
    Svetlana
    GUI team leader,
    Clicksoftware.
  • Nikolay Atanasov 19 Jan 2009
    Hi Svetlana,

    As soon as becoming official (Q1 2009), RadDocking will support all the themes that are supported by the rest of the controls in the suite. We are also working on improving the Blend support of our controls. As of Q1 2009, we will provide extended Blend support and you will be able to customize the visual elements of the tools in the Expression Blend Studio.

    Regards,
    Nikolay Atanasov
    Telerik Silverlight Team

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