In prior blog posts, we’ve detailed some of the great new features coming to the WPF SyntaxEditor and its add-ons in 2011.2. That’s only a small portion of new functionality that will ship with WPF Studio 2011.2 though.
Today I’d like to start a series of posts talking about the new product being added to WPF Studio 2011.2 and integrated into all our WPF products in the upcoming 2011.2 version. The new product is called Themes and will be freely available for use by any WPF control customers.
Background
Over the years we’ve had a lot of customers ask for a way to make their native WPF controls take on a similar appearance to Actipro products, or vice versa. This is especially important when using themes such as Actipro’s Office themes, for which there are no Microsoft-provided themes, since in that scenario you may end up with Actipro’s controls rendering like Office and native WPF controls rendering using the current system theme.
For the 2011.2 release of WPF Studio, we’ve set our sights on themes and have made some extremely significant updates/enhancements that focus on giving your applications a consistent, great look throughout (ours and your own custom controls, and native WPF controls) and have made some bold improvements in various control styles to pull in the most modern appearances from popular applications.
Related Posts
All of the enhancements will be explained in this and other subsequent blog posts.
- Native WPF Control Themes (this post)
- Common Asset Pool
- Docking/MDI Visual Updates
- Built-In Themes
- Tinting Support
- Wrapping Up
Native WPF Control Themes
One of the largest pieces of the updates is that we now have complete implementations of styles/templates for all native WPF controls.
Styles/Templates
In most cases such as scrollbars and buttons, we’ve re-created but kept the default control appearance for each system theme. However in some other cases, such as with menus and toolbars, we’ve reimagined their appearance, using Visual Studio 2010’s look as a guide.
In the screenshot above, you can see we have our Docking/MDI’s WindowControl (a control that renders a non-glass window chrome) and inside of it is just a native Menu, ToolBar, TextBox, ComboBox, and StatusBar.
The Actipro native control themes have been applied to the application and thus all of these controls have inherited our customized styles. In this case, the current system theme is Aero so that is the theme that has been applied to the controls.
Notice how the menu, toolbars, toolbar-embedded controls like textboxes and comboboxes, and the statusbar have all received modernized template makeovers that improve their look.
Office Themes
Office themes come with our products as well. And for native controls, we’ve gone ahead and given them an Office-like appearance via our styles/templates.
The screenshot above is the same window as in our first screenshot but with an Office black theme applied.
Now that we can have control over native WPF control styles/templates, we’re able to make sure they render with a great appearance that is consistent with Actipro’s custom controls.
Switching Themes
A side benefit of having styles/templates defined for native WPF controls is that now you can easily switch up how the native WPF controls in your application look on-the-fly. Even if your system theme is Aero, with one line of code you can easily switch to an Office or Luna theme and then entire application will render with the appropriate appearance.
Auto or Manually Apply
We’ve engineered our native WPF controls styles/templates to support activation via one line of code in your application startup code. Nothing could be easier!
Alternatively you can choose to not have native WPF controls use our styles/templates, which is the default. Even so, we’ve made pre-defined style and template keys so that you can easily access and use our native WPF control style/templates on a case-by-case basis with code such as:
1: <StatusBar
2: Style="{DynamicResource {x:Static themes:SharedResourceKeys.StatusBarStyleKey}}"
3: />
Beta Testers Wanted
We’re still finishing up the code but expect to have a beta ready for testing soon. If you would be interested in helping us test Themes for WPF and are a WPF control customer with an active subscription, e-mail us to sign up for beta testing. Please include your organization name and indicate how you intend to use our new Themes features.
Summary
Following the beta, we hope to have WPF Studio 2011.2 ready for launch in the next couple weeks. It’s taken longer than we expected to develop, but the end result is spectacular and well worth the effort in our opinion.
It’s going to make your apps look really great!
The next post in this series will cover the new common asset pool.