Actipro WPF Controls v2020.1 development is in progress, and the new version’s main goals are to modernize our UI control features/themes, and make theme customization much easier.

In our previous post, we talked about the new WPF theme generation system that we’ve developed for v2020.1, and its theme definitions that have options for customizing themes.

In today’s post, we’ll introduce the new WPF Theme Designer application that comes with the WPF Controls and provides a visual way to customize theme definitions.

Theme Definitions

As described in our previous post, theme definitions have over 50 options that are used by our theme generator to output asset resources such as brushes, thicknesses, etc. into resource dictionaries that provide a WPF theme. The generated theme is used by Actipro controls and optionally native WPF controls to render your application’s UI consistently throughout. You can also reuse any of our generated asset resources in your UI via DynamicResource calls.

Customizing Theme Definition Options

Our main goals for the WPF Theme Designer application were to make it easy to visualize and customize theme definitions.  The application provides numerous "entire-theme preset" menu items that initialize a theme definition based on one of our pre-defined themes:

Here you see the app using the selected theme preset, and with its Code document open. The Code document lists App.OnStartup code that you can paste into your own application to replicate the same theme in your application.

The Theme Definition tool window on the right contains a property grid where you can fully customize the many theme definition options. When a theme definition option is changed, the Code document’s text is updated appropriately to set non-default values.

On top of that, the app also immediately generates a new theme and applies it so you get instant feedback on how theme definition options affect the appearance.

Let’s change the Intent to Dark and look at the Resource Browser document…

The Resource Browser document contains a complete list of the asset resources that are generated by the theme definition. Type in text in the filter box at the top to look for specific asset resources. In this case, we’ve typed “bullet” to look for asset resources related to checkbox and radio buttons.

If you wish to reuse an asset resource in your application, simply click the button to copy a DynamicResource to the asset’s resource key and paste that in your XAML.

For instance, if we wanted a general low-contrast container background brush to use in a Border in our application, we’d copy a DynamicResource to ContainerBackgroundLowBrushKey and would paste it into our XAML like:

<Border Background=”{DynamicResource {x:Static themes:AssetResourceKeys.ContainerBackgroundLowBrushKey}}”>

Summary

This is a first look at the WPF Theme Designer application. We’ll follow up soon with additional information on its many other features.

Post in the comments below with any questions or comments on the WPF Theme Designer application.

Beta Testers Wanted

We have started beta testing v2020.1. If you would like to assist us in testing, please write us at our support address. We would like individuals who are already licensed for the 2019.1 version, are willing to use beta versions of 2020.1 (.NET Core or .NET Framework), and who want to provide feedback, especially in the area of our themes updates.

Actipro WPF Controls v2020.1 development is in progress, and the new version’s main goals are to modernize our UI control features/themes, and make theme customization much easier.

In our previous post, we talked about how we will be bringing .NET Core builds of our WPF Controls in v2020.1, along with publishing NuGet packages.

In today’s post, we’ll start to dive into one of the largest areas of the themes-related updates for this version, which is the new theme generation system.

Generated Themes

The Actipro WPF controls provide numerous complete pre-defined themes that render similar to various Windows and Office versions.  These themes apply to Actipro and optionally native WPF controls as well so that there is consistency throughout your application’s appearance.  While this system has always worked well, the current pre-defined themes are somewhat difficult to customize. 

We wanted to take themes to the next level for the new version, and we have truly built something fantastic.

What we came up with is a framework where you can configure numerous options on a theme definition object.  When you register that theme definition with our ThemeManager, you then can apply that theme at any time with a single line of code.  Multiple theme definitions can be registered, allowing you to register “light” and “dark” themes (or any other variant you like) and instantly toggle between them at run-time.

When a theme definition is applied, instead of simply merging pre-defined resource assets (brushes, thicknesses, etc.) into the Application.Resources as before, we dynamically construct hundreds of resource assets very quickly and merge them into Application.Resources.  The resource assets that are created are based on the options in the theme definition, and are generated in a fraction of a second.

Like now, we still provide themes that render similar to Windows and Office.  We register theme definitions for those, among others, by default with the ThemeManager so they can be applied at any time with a single line of code.

Customizing Themes

Say that you love our Office Colorful Indigo theme (Word-like appearance), but you don’t like how it has grayscale background state hover/pressed effects for toolbar and menu items.  In the past, this would be difficult to change... but not any more.  You can get the default theme definition we provide for this theme, adjust an option on it to use accent colors for toolbar/menu state backgrounds, and when the new theme definition is applied, you’ll see the adjusted appearance in action.

What happens behind the scenes is that our theme generation logic adheres to the options you specify, and the brush resource assets that it creates for toolbar/menu state backgrounds are generated with accent color values instead of grayscale color values.

Theme Definition Options

How many options are there for theme definitions?  At the time of this writing, we have well over 50 options so far and are adding more as we work towards wrapping up the first beta build of v2020.1.

You can control all kinds of things with theme definitions options, including color palette, border contrast, bullet appearance, font size, corner radius, window appearance, and much more.

Beta Testers Wanted

We are approaching a point where we’re like to start collecting a list of beta testers for the 2020.1 version, who can start working with the new features soon.  If you would like to assist us in testing, please write us at our support address.  We would like individuals who are already licensed for the 2019.1 version, are willing to use beta versions of 2020.1 (.NET Core or .NET Framework), and who want to provide feedback, especially in the area of our themes updates.

Summary

We’re just scratching the surface here of what you can do with the new theme definitions.  We haven’t even shown off the new Theme Designer app yet.  We’ll continue to dive into the area of theme generation in upcoming blog posts.  Stay tuned!

Post in the comments below with any questions or comments on theme generation.

Actipro WPF Controls v2020.1 development is in progress, and the new version’s main goals are to modernize our UI control features/themes, and make theme customization much easier.

In the previous post, we saw how a WPF Window's system context menu can be themed/customized with new WindowChrome features.  Now that we've shown off a lot of new features coming to WindowChrome, let's start looking at other areas of v2020.1.

Shadow Chrome

In modernizing all our control themes (more on this in future posts), we wanted to come up with a new simple control for providing modern drop shadows.  What we came up with is ShadowChrome. 

ShadowChrome is a simple decorator that can wrap any content.  It has settings for the direction, opacity, and elevation.  

The screenshots show how altering the elevation can give the shadow a drastically different appearance.

ShadowChrome isn't limited to only rectangular shapes.  It can also be applied to non-rectangular shapes.

Summary

ShadowChrome is going to be used throughout our control themes in the 2020.1 version as a small part of modernizing our themes.  It will be shipped as a public primitive control in our Shared Library, so that it's fully accessible to our customers as well.

Post in the comments below if you have any feedback or questions about ShadowChrome.

Actipro WPF Controls v2020.1 development is in progress, and the new version’s main goals are to modernize our UI control features/themes, and make theme customization much easier.

In the previous post, we saw how the window’s title bar header can be customized.  In today’s post, we’ll look at how the window’s system menu can be customized.

WPF Windows and Win32 System Menus

WPF Windows have always used Win32 to provide their system menus, which are menus displayed when clicking the window’s title bar icon, or when right-clicking on the window title bar.

The Win32 system menu is not rendered by WPF, and therefore never matches the style of a WPF application.  This is especially evident when using dark themes in your app.

This light Win32 menu looks awful compared to dark-themed menus in the same application.

Customizing the System Menu

The latest WindowChrome updates automatically replace the Win32-based system title bar context menu with a custom WPF-based one with similar functionality. There are several benefit to this.

First, the menu will use whatever ContextMenu and MenuItem styles are active in your application. This ensures that the system title bar context menu renders in the same style as other menus in your application.  If you use Actipro Themes with native control theming enabled, the context menu can render in dark theme, etc.

Second, since a custom WPF context menu is being created, the menu can be fully-customized via an event prior to being opened. This sample shows how a 'Help' menu item can be injected into the system title bar context menu.

Summary

Using WPF menus for the system menu ensures theme consistency and easily allows for complete customization of the menu’s contents.

Post in the comments below if you have any feedback or questions about WindowChrome system menu customization.

Actipro WPF Controls v2020.1 development is in progress, and the new version’s main goals are to modernize our UI control features/themes, and make theme customization much easier.

In the previous post, we saw how the window’s content area can optionally be merged into the title bar area.  In today’s post, we’ll look at how the header portion of the title bar (where the text title normally is) can be customized and replaced if desired.

Title Bar Header Customization

While the Windows standard is to display a text title in the title bar, sometimes modern apps like to swap that out for other controls, or to completely remove it altogether. 

In this example, we’ll show how a PopupButton from our Shared Library can be added to the title bar, using one of our title bar button styles to render it with title bar brushes. 

Here we see the text title is replaced by the PopupButton.  When the button is clicked, it shows a menu with some options for managing the document open in the window.  This kind of user interface configuration could be used for small apps that don’t have a menu.

We’ve set up the button to have a maximum width of 300.  Here’s a look at how the button resizes itself as available width descreases.

Summary

These and all the other recently-described WindowChrome features will be available in the 2020.1 version.  We’ve got one more post describing new WindowChrome features before we move onto another area of what’s coming in 2020.1.

Post in the comments below if you have any feedback or questions about WindowChrome title bar customization.