A Tip to Play with RadControls for Silverlight Themes

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:

3. Browse the ExamplesCS project for instance, open the App.Xaml.cs file and set the application theme in the constructor like this:

4. 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:

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.