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Themes and dll download sizes

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Ian
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Ian asked on 20 May 2009, 08:24 AM
The Charting dll weighs in at about 500K but if I want to use the "Summer Theme", according to information posted elsewhere here I need to reference Telerik.Windows.Themes.Summer which adds a not-insignificant 1.3MB to my download size. If I want the user to also be able to switch back to the default Office 2007 theme I also have to download Telerik.Windows.Themes.Office_Black.dll which is another 1.3MB. And yet if I don't want to be able to select the theme I get this "for free" in the 500K Charting dll?

So how are you able to support the Office theme without that huge overhead of these theme dlls? Is it because the theme.dll contains themes for ALL Telerik controls, whereas the Chart.dll contains just those parts it needs?  1.4MB to offer the same functionality via code selectability seems way too high a price to pay.

I also noticed that the headings and labels all vanish with the "Summer" theme. I'm guessing this is because they have been left at their default value of "white" which when displayed on white means they can't be seen. This seems to be a fundamental flaw in the theme unless I'm missing something subtle?

Ian

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Dwight
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answered on 22 May 2009, 07:06 AM
Hello Ian,

The default OfficeBlack theme, included in the Charting dll is applied by the default Silverlight engine (using styles and templates). Changing the theme in Silverlight 2.0 at runtime is not a simple process, it requires additional theming engine, which we implemented. That engine, unfortunately, sets additional restrictions on the XAML used and currently requires that all resources it will manage, to be in a single assembly.

The Silverlight 3.0 styling will render this engine obsolete as it allows simple theme changing the way WPF allows (e.g. in Silverlight 2.0, change of control style can be done once only,while 3.0 allows multiple changes in style).

Each theme created in Telerik is complete and goes through a process of testing to confirm coherency.

On the problem with the Summer theme, I assure you, the labels are not left with default values. There is an issue with applying the theme, which we are working to resolve.

Kind regards,
Evtim
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yjh
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answered on 22 May 2009, 08:08 AM
I found that the help documentation is not correct somewhere.

For example,  with the latest build you can't get effect as shown in figure at bottom of

ms-help://telerik.windows.controls.silverlight/telerik.windows.controls.charting/chart-create-declaratively.html

First , chart:AxisX has no MinorTicksVisibility property and you can't get CustomLegend display.

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Ian
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answered on 22 May 2009, 10:32 AM
Thanks for the reply.

Do you have an estimate for when the problem with the theme might be resolved? I have a project that needs to be delivered in 2 weeks time, and the customer will not accept the default theme version.

In our case we don't need the theme to be changed dynamically, and ideally we'd just want to set it once-and-for-all the same way we set every other template - in XAML but a response elsewhere indicated this was not possible and we have to go through the process of downloading the large dll and selecting it in code.

Ian
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Dwight
Telerik team
answered on 25 May 2009, 06:51 AM
Hello Ian,

The Theming mechanism is common for the whole Silverlight suite, and it requires all controls' themes to be in a single assembly. This requirement is due to Silverlight 2 restrictions, and, unfortunately we cannot overcome it.

You will have to include the required theme dll in your project.

Regards,
Evtim
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joe castle
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answered on 24 Jan 2010, 02:20 PM
Hello,

As I can understand from Telerik's answer, the theme dlls huge size was because of the SL2 limitations. We are on SL3 now and the dll size just increased, for example, Telerik.Windows.Themes.Windows7.dll size is 2.3 Mb. 

I tried using the win7 theme's xaml but there are so many <?includes that I gave up hunting and merging them into a generic.xaml. 

Is there an easy way to have theme but avoid the big dll reference?

Thanks,
joe


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Hristo
Telerik team
answered on 26 Jan 2010, 07:57 AM
Hi joe castle,

Themes are big because they have style for all RadControls. With Silverlight 3 you have an option to create custom theme with styles for the controls that you use. This will reduce the size of the theme assembly.
Also please note that all assemblies are archived so their size is significantly reduced (as xaml is heavily compressed).

Let us know if you need more information.

All the best,
Hristo
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