Themes for WPF

Application-Wide Themes

The current theme can be set via a single property on the Actipro theme manager. When changed, the entire application will shift to render in the new theme. This includes native WPF controls too, if Actipro's themes for native controls are being used.

Actipro Themes can be applied to your entire application to give it a stunning appearance

Common Asset Pool

Actipro Themes consolidates all brush, thickness, etc. assets for a theme into a single place called the common asset pool. This asset pool contains over 800 distinct asset resources for each theme supported by Actipro Themes, everything from the background of a menu item in hover state to the padding thickness for a button.

A diagram showing how the same brush from the common asset pool is used by the styles for both a native TextBox and an Actipro SyntaxEditor

All of the Actipro control product styles/templates as well as Actipro's native WPF control styles/templates use the same assets, meaning there is visual consistency in sizes, colors, etc. when controls appear next to each other.

Reusing Assets

The hundreds of assets in the common asset pool are designed to be reusable in your applications. They can all be accessed with a simple resource key reference.

A demonstration of reusing various container and workspace brush assets, as well as a pre-defined style for embedded buttons

The pool define several additional helpful brush assets in each theme for things like container and workspace backgrounds. There are multiple variations of each (light, medium, dark). You can choose which to use for various scenarios but regardless of which one you choose, everything will look great with the rest of the theme.

Several styles for native controls are also included, allowing the X button in the screenshot above to easily render similar to a standard toolbar button.

Redefining Assets

It’s easy to redefine individual assets if you don’t like the pre-defined defaults. There is also a built-in simple mechanism by which you can redefine assets only for specific themes so that if you only wanted to modify a particular asset for Office themes, you could do so.

Either way, these redefined assets can flow into all Actipro and native controls in your application.

Browsing Assets

A Theme Browser utility is included that allows you to view all the assets defined for a theme, and then optionally copy the resource key reference for usage in your application.

Tinting Themes

Each of the hundreds of brush assets for each theme have been categorized into numerous tint groups. Further, the various tint groups have been organized into several pre-defined tint group sets. With just several lines of code, an entire theme can be tinted towards multiple colors. For instance, the main set of brushes can go towards one color, while state-related (hover, pressed, etc.) brushes can be tinted towards another.

If you are using Ribbon, you can also tint the application button towards another color in case you don't wish it to be its default blue.