RadControls for Silverlight Q1'09: Theming

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Valentin Stoychev | Comments 3

Q1'09 was a huge release for the Telerik Silverlight controls - the DockingGridView, Chart, MaskedTextBoxToolbar, and ColorPicker controls are now official. We also shipped the first CTP of the rich text editor for Silverlight - RadEditor. If you missed - we also redesigned our demos application.

Not only we shipped all these new controls, but we also spent a lot of efforts to ensure that our themes are with top quality. For all the controls we shipped 3 themes - Vista, Office and Summer. We made the needed adjustments to ensure that they are editable in the latest version of Blend - Blend2SP1. Along with these changes we added styles for the common Microsoft's controls. All this was done so you can build your application without the need to do any design work, but to get the styles for the radiobuttons, checkboxes, scrollbars, normal buttons, etc for free with RadControls for Silverlight. Check the application below to see how the Microsoft controls look when they are styled with our embedded themes:

Get Microsoft Silverlight

 

 

What you need to do in order to style the Microsoft controls to use the Telerik theme?

You just these two simple steps:

  1. Declare the theme you want to use as a static resource in your application.
    <telerik:Theme x:Key="TelerikTheme" Source="/Telerik.Windows.Controls;component/Themes/generic.xaml" /> 
  2. Set the style to be applied to the microsoft control:
    <CheckBox Content="CheckBox" telerik:StyleManager.Theme="{StaticResource DefaultTheme}"/> 

Let us know if you have any ideas for improvements!

3 Comments

  • trent 17 Mar 2009
    I created a custom theme based off of Summer source named it Telerik.Windows.Theme.RCBlack... how would I apply these to both MS controls and for example RadPanelBar.  When I try i always get the default theme of Office_Black?


    thanks
  • Brian Swiger 28 Sep 2009
    I have the same question as Trent.  I want a modified Vista theme applied....and I've updated the Vista Theme's XAML...but how do I apply it to all my controls?  Thanks.
  • Ahmed Saeed 10 Dec 2009
    Is that it??? I mean can we apply themes on application level ,do we have to declare for each and every Microsoft control in the application?  Is there a better way?

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