Troubleshooting

This topic contains troubleshooting data specific to the Actipro Themes product.

Aero or Office 2010 Themes Are Not Working

There are two steps that must be performed in order to leverage the Aero-style (Aero and Office 2010) themes in your application. So, if you try to set the current theme to one of the supported Aero-style themes, but the colors do not update accordingly, then please ensure the following steps have been performed.

The Aero-style themes are located in a separate assembly, to help reduce the install base size for customers that do not use it. Therefore, you must first ensure that your application has a reference to the ActiproSoftware.Themes.Aero.Wpf.dll assembly.

Once the reference has been added, the Aero theme catalog must be manually registered with the theme manager during application startup before the theme is used:

ThemesAeroThemeCatalogRegistrar.Register();

ListView Controls are Displaying Items Incorrectly

The native WPF ListView control comes in two forms. In its simplest form, it acts just like a ListBox, which is its base class. To display tabular data, a ListView can be assigned a GridView which contains one or more column definitions. Our native theme support for the ListView is limited to this latter form, due to the style extensibility of the ListView.

Therefore, in cases where a ListView is being used without an associated GridView would need to be replaced with an instance of ListBox. There should be no loss of functionality by making this change.

Themes Do Not Work When Hosted in Non-WPF Applications

Ensuring Application.Current Is Initialized

Actipro's theme manager and Image embedded resources (such as those used in our IntelliPrompt popups) with "pack://" URIs both require access to the WPF Application.Current object. When hosting WPF controls in a WinForms or other non-WPF application, the Application.Current property will be null by default.

This effectively prevents the theme manager from dynamically changing the current theme, and any "pack://" URI references to Image embedded resources may fail with a NotSupportedException and message "The URI prefix is not recognized."

Both issues can be resolved by creating a WPF Application object. The WPF Application object can be programmatically created in your application startup before any UI is created like this:

if (System.Windows.Application.Current == null) {
	wpfApplication = new System.Windows.Application();
	wpfApplication.ShutdownMode = System.Windows.ShutdownMode.OnExplicitShutdown;
}

The wpfApplication variable should be stored at your static application level and in your application shutdown code, the wpfApplication.Shutdown() method should be called to explicitly close the WPF Application.

The reason we need to use ShutdownMode.OnExplicitShutdown above is that by default, the last WPF window that closes will shut down the WPF application and it will be as if no application was created, breaking "pack://" syntax and causing the NotSupportedException exception. If you are still in evaluation mode, the Actipro evaluation dialog for the WPF Controls could trigger this when it closes. By explicitly controlling the lifetime of the WPF application, you prevent that scenario from occurring.

Ensuring ThemeManager Is Initialized

The Actipro ThemeManager is initialized in a Send-priority dispatched call when it is first used. This initialization can be triggered manually, but also happens automatically when themed Actipro WPF Controls are first loaded.

The initialization is important because it is what makes the various Actipro theme resources like brushes available to all the themed controls. If the initialization didn't occur yet, some WPF Controls used in interop may not render with their normal appearance.

In this interop scenario, it might be required to manually trigger the initialization to ensure that theme resources like brushes are loaded properly when the first window of the application is displayed.

This sample code used in the application startup logic (and after ensuring Application.Current is initialized) sets the current theme, which will tell ThemeManager to initialize as well, prior to UI being loaded:

ThemeManager.CurrentTheme = ThemeNames.MetroDark

Snap Layout Menus Do Not Appear

Windows 11 added a new feature to show a Snap Layouts Menu when the user hovers the mouse over the Maximize or Restore button in the application title bar. This feature is fully supported by WindowChrome. If you do not see the Snap Layouts Menu on Windows 11, make sure your application has explicitly declared Windows 11 as a supported operating system in the app.manifest file. Refer to the WindowChrome topic for more information about declaring operating system support.