I've reviewed the help topics on Creating a Custom Theme, but I'm not sure how to solve the following two problems:

1)  I allow for the use of different Telerik themes within my application.  However, I've also created some custom controls which I would like to participate in your theme system so my application maintains a consistent look and feel.  (Most of these are very simple controls such as buttons that draw icons in XAML -- I'd like the foreground colors to match the current theme.)  How can I make my custom controls participate in the different Telerik themes?

2)  I'd like to modify certain very specific parts of your existing themes.  For example, I want to set the cursor color of the TextBox to have a TemplateBinding to the Foreground property.  What's the best way to do this?  Can I derive a custom theme off of one of your existing themes and make this targeted change or should I extract the existing XAML for each theme/control combination and rebuild the existing theme?

Oh and it would be nice if the solution was reusable across Silverlight and WPF -- I have a composite SL/WPF app.

[edit] Some clarifications, based on reading other forum posts about themes.  Theme selection is done via configuration files, but not at runtime.  This is not a dynamic resource issue.  For color selection of my custom controls, it would be nice if I could use a predefined Telerik resource, however, I would be satisfied if I could at least define my own color or brush resources for a given theme and then use them in my controls.

Hello Michael,

 

The built-in Telerik themes can only be applied to Telerik RadControls and a few MS basic controls, which are internally used by our controls for different purposes. Our theming mechanism is consctructed to work only with these controls and it is not capable to work with your custom controls. In our online documentation you will find more info about the Telerik themes and how to modify and apply them to the RadControls. I hope this information will help you. I believe that it will answer you to some of your further questions. As you might know with our latest Q2 release we introduces another theme - Metro which will be more appropriate in your case regaring to the modification:

                                    "Metro UI for RadControls for Silverlight and WPF"
                                          "Metro Theme Customization Made Easy"



If you need any further assistance do not hesitate to contact us! 

Best wishes,
Vanya Pavlova
the Telerik team