RadControls for Silverlight Q1'09: Theming

Q1'09 was a huge release for the Telerik Silverlight controls - the Docking, GridView, Chart, MaskedTextBox, Toolbar, and ColorPicker controls are now official. We also shipped the first CTP of the rich text editor for Silverlight - RadEditor. If you missed - we also redesigned our demos application.

Not only we shipped all these new controls, but we also spent a lot of efforts to ensure that our themes are with top quality. For all the controls we shipped 3 themes - Vista, Office and Summer. We made the needed adjustments to ensure that they are editable in the latest version of Blend - Blend2SP1. Along with these changes we added styles for the common Microsoft's controls. All this was done so you can build your application without the need to do any design work, but to get the styles for the radiobuttons, checkboxes, scrollbars, normal buttons, etc for free with RadControls for Silverlight. Check the application below to see how the Microsoft controls look when they are styled with our embedded themes:

What you need to do in order to style the Microsoft controls to use the Telerik theme?

You just these two simple steps:

1. Declare the theme you want to use as a static resource in your application.

   <telerik:Theme x:Key="TelerikTheme" Source="/Telerik.Windows.Controls;component/Themes/generic.xaml" />

2. Set the style to be applied to the microsoft control:
   

   <CheckBox Content="CheckBox" telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource DefaultTheme}"/>