Reusing built-in Themes elements

[Kirill Prokopenko]

Hi guys,

Just wondering, if there's any way to reuse brushes and colors you use in Telerik Themes, provided with RadControls? I have several user controls I would like to style according to currently selected Telerik theme (take border styles from RadDock panels, background from RadToolbar, etc.).

Thanks in advance!

[Hristo]

Hi Ibrahim Muckra,

Please have a look at this forum thread.

Greetings,
Hristo
the Telerik team

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[Kirill Prokopenko]

Hi Hristo,

Thanks for the link. It's about how to apply Telerik themes on standart SL controls. It works fine in our projects. All, standart, custom, user and telerik controls have theming enabled and work fine (I've extended provided Telerik themes with extra styles for user controls). Everything works perfect.

The problem was expected and occured when I updated project to the new version of RadControls 2010.Q1. Since I had custom Telerik themes (compiled from the sources provided in 2009.Q3 or Q4 + my user control styles), they just didn't work with 2010.Q1 and I had to recreate them again, all 4 or 5 themes for all of user controls and check once more that brushes and borders represent corresponding values from the new version of RadControls. I'm expecting at least 1000 more user controls with custom theming. Sounds like the next time I update RadControls to the newest version, I'll have to check styles for all 1000+ user controls for all themes.

The question is: is there any way to reference specific style from Telerik theme for my user control without extending existing Telerik theme? I just want to have for example Windows7 theme referenced, and take i.e RadButton background for 200 of my user controls and other 800 would have border from RadWindow or anything else.

Thanks!

[Sia]

Hello Ibrahim Muckra,

We apologize for the late reply.

The problems with the upgrade of our controls are due to a major facelift of all 6 built-in themes which we introduced with the 2010.Q1 version. It was initiated by the necessity of providing our clients with themes which have more consistent look and feel among all Silverlight controls.

First of all, let me inform you that we don't plan to redesign our old themes again in the future. We hope that our clients are more satisfied with their new look now and we realize that this was a breaking change for all of them, who had custom themes or who had their applications' design based on one of our themes. That's why we do our best to provide working solutions for all of them.

I hope that you understand that some of our controls have a complicated design, which means for example that they have backgrounds which consist of two or more gradients. That is why it is not so easy to define which background you will need to get and set in a different place in your application.

A possible solution of this problem is to set the generated XAML of the Telerik theme which you use as a Source of ResourceDictionary within a MergedDictionaries collection. After that knowing the key of the resource you need, you can set it on the element you want.

Of course there is a possible situation when we can change some name of resource, but after the facelift mentioned above it will not be a common case.

Hope this helps.

All the best,
Sia
the Telerik team

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[Kirill Prokopenko]

Hello, Sia

Thanks for clarification the situation around my case.
Your solution sounds doable and sufficient to our needs.

Thanks!