Yes, that is great for styling controls but it doesn't always cover my needs.

For example, I have a custom busy spinner for a report runner I built.  In the past I would bind the foreground property on the control to {StaticResource Brush03} because that is one of the colors in the theme.  Then if I changed themes then the color of my spinner would also change to align with the theme.

I guess a better way to put it is how can I get the brushes and colors that the theme manager uses so I can use them for other things in my application?

Jesse

Hi Jesse,

as I mentioned in my previous response our theme xaml files are structured in a such a way so all the commonly used parts(i.e. colors, brushes, styles and templates) are defined in Styles.Shared.xaml & Theme.Colors.xaml & Styles.WPF.xaml. Since these are referenced in almost (if not all) specific xaml file styling a particular control. This includes the implicit styles for MS intrinsic control(ie Button). So if you haven't disabled the styling of the MS core controls you should be fine referencing this parts(ie Color_28) as static resources provided you've applied the theme prior to parsing the xaml which is referencing the Color_28. 

I hope the above is clear enough. If not please feel free ask for further assistance.

Another effect of this is that static resources that were available before are no longer available if not used in one of the built in control styles.  Ie if Color_28 is not in use on any of the styles applied to controls I have in use then referencing it will throw an exception.

I would like to see the theme manager put all colors and brushes into the resource dictionary regardless of if they're used.

Jesse

Jesse Hamilton said:

Is there any means of accessing these resources at design time?

Unfortunately, at this point the ThemeManager does not support design time. I'll spend some time to see if this could be workarounded somehow. 

Jesse Hamilton said:

Does the documentation have a reference for these resources and what their values are for each of the different themes?

The ThemeManager job is basically monitoring what controls are used by the application and includes the corresponding resource dictionaries as you would have done if you have to include these xaml resource dictionaries the old way. So you need to check out the .xamls. For example each theme has most of its reusable parts defined in Styles.Shared.xaml & Theme.Colors.xaml files - including brushes and colors. I suppose there you could find out what is what.

You could probably partially fix the designer complaining for these StaticResources by manually(the old way) apply these shared dictionaries I mentioned above. This will fix the errors you're getting during design time. It really doesn't matter which one from which theme exactly you get the shared resource dictionaries since these brushes and colors are common through out all the themes. It probably make sense adding the ones with the theme you plan to use. This could be used as a dev time fix so the designer could operate.

Hope this helps,

Ahhh, gotcha, so these resources will be resolved because the theme manager loads the same resource dictionary when applying an application theme.

Is there any means of accessing these resources at design time?  Does the documentation have a reference for these resources and what their values are for each of the different themes?  It would be nice to have design time support, after moving to the thememanager from the resource dictionaries visual studio can't resolve the staticresources at design time and throws errors into the error list.

Jesse