Help on migrating control templates to newer versions

[Sam]

Hi there,

As part of building our LOB application we've extracted and modified quite a lot of control templates in the Windows 8 theme for the Silverlight controls, so that we can add our own features, and style the controls as closely as possible to our own look and feel.

Whenever we upgrade the Silverlight controls to the most current version, invariably something has changed and some of our control templates no longer work or have bugs in them. Also, sometimes new features are added to a control that require changes in the control template as well, but we don't get these features because our templates don't change.

Would it be possible to get a list of controls that have had changes made to their control templates with each release, and what those changes are for? That way we know which controls we need to re-test, and in some cases re-template. At the moment we really have no idea which templates have changed, except through trial and error which is not ideal.

Any other advice you might have on upgrading copies of control templates would be gratefully received, as I'm sure this is a common problem for a lot of people that need to customize these controls beyond simple styling.

Thanks,

Sam

[Vanya Pavlova]

Hello Sam,




Thank you for contacting Telerik support and sharing your thoughts with us! I can definitely confirm that your request is a reasonable one. The biggest change in our styles was made with our Q1 2012 SP1 when we provide the option to our customers to modify the appearance of our controls using implicit styles. For that reason we gathered the style files per assembly and you may use these when creating custom themes. I strongly recommend you to check this forum thread for further reference. From there you can see the benefits of using this approach. The same is applicable to Silverlight as well. Currently we support two kinds of theming mechanisms and you can read the difference between these approaches in the following thread. We always appreciate customer feedback and we do our best each Q to limit the number of breaking changes for the whole control suite. As you most probably know we list all breaking changes in the

"Changes and Backwards Compatibilities" section in our online documentation. However there is no specific section for the control templates and styles, which you can use as a guideline for upgrading themes.

Each time you encounter any problems you can contact us in order to resolve the current issues you have already met.  


Wish you a great day!


Regards,
Vanya Pavlova
Telerik

[Sam]

Hi Vanya, thanks for your reply.

We did look into implicit theming as soon as it was available, but unfortunately we couldn't move to it because of our reliance on RadChart. It would be a useful approach for maintaining styles as you could easily compare changes from one version of a XAML file to the next, however it's not going to be feasible for us for some time yet.

Would you be able to at least consider my request for more documentation? All we need is an indication in the Release Notes that a control's XAML components (control templates, styles, etc) have changed since the last release, so we can compare them against our changes - at the moment that information is not really available.

Thanks,

Sam

[Dimitrina]

Hi Sam,

Thank you for your feedback. We do agree that all the changes introduced to the control templates should be documented so that the migration to new versions to be easier. That is why we are currently discussing the options this to be done.

We will be glad to hear if you have any particular suggestions on how it will be most convenient for you, as a client. Please feel free to share your thoughts on how you would like to have the changes documented.

Regards,
Didie
Telerik