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Visual style builder preview

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Themes and Visual Style Builder
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Mike Renwick
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Mike Renwick asked on 17 Jun 2009, 08:21 AM
Very quick question- is there a quick and easy way to preview what a given style looks like on a specific control?

Basically I'm using a treeview, and my project is using one of the office themes, which seems to make the treeview appear with the little arrows instead of the more traditional + - type view.

Right now, it seems like I either have to fully customize the control via Visual Style Builder (in my opinion, a lot of functionality but very fiddly and requiring the overhead of saving xml file to local project, add resource etc etc), or pick an existing style like "Vista" or "Office2007Silver" which doesn't really give me any clue as to what the control (populated dynamically at runtime), will look like until I recompile and rerun the project, and discover it's got a back colour/gradient that doesn't fit with a plain white form!

Thanks
Mike


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Mike
Telerik team
answered on 19 Jun 2009, 07:04 AM
Hello Mike Renwick,

The easiest way to preview a controls with its theme selected in the designer is to
  • drop the corresponding theme component on the design surface,
  • change controls ThemeName accordingly and
  • the open the Visual Style Builder from control's Smart Tag.
If you have load a custom theme from file/resource you should do the following:
  • Open VSB from control's smart tag (or from the standalone executable)
  • If you chose to load VSB from the executable, then you will have to load the corresponding control from the "File->Load Control" menu
  • Load the file with the theme from VSB File menu
In the latest version of VSB you can change the back-color of the design surface (from menu View-> Change Design Surface Color) to match the background of  your app.

All of the above could be acheved through API. if you are interested by this approach please let me know.

Regards,
Mike
the Telerik team

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Stefan
Telerik team
answered on 17 Mar 2011, 03:45 PM
Hello Mike,

I am glad to inform you that Q1 2011 is released and the VSB theme preview is greatly improved. Additionally, VSB has a functionality to start the newly introduced tool - ThemeViewer - which gives you the ability to preview the created theme of all RadControls for WinForms together. For more information refer to this blog post.
 
Greetings,
Stefan
the Telerik team

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Themes and Visual Style Builder
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Mike Renwick
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Mike
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Stefan
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