Windows System Color Theme for Silverlight - Part Three

The Windows system color theme for Silverlight now includes styles for all toolkit controls except charts and graphs (these will be themed shortly). When theming the remaining controls, we decided to make a few changes to all controls...

• All button controls are now slightly rounded to add a bit of visual interest to the set
• The "Animated" property for text hinting is now used to soften the appearance of fonts (we're not sure it works well when the interface is in high contrast modes, but it looks great when in standard mode)
• All controls use the font Segoe UI and fallback to Lucida Sans Unicode and then Verdana 

The project also contains a Styles.xaml file that you can use to theme your Silverlight Navigation Application projects by simply swapping Styles.xaml files. This new theme is a high contrast derivation of one of the three new themes that we plan to make available to the community this month. More details can be found below and the updated project is available for download here.

 

Screen Shots

What follows are screen shots of the controls in standard and high contrast modes... 

 

Text Hinting

As mentioned previously, the theme now uses texthinting set to "Animated", and the controls look great in standard mode, but they are a bit muddied in high contrast modes with dark background colors, as you can see below (the first image shows texthinting set to "Animated" and the second image shows texthinting set to "Fixed"). If your scenarios require crisp text, we recommend you do a search and replace on "Animated" and replace it with "Fixed"... 

 

Let me know what you think of the theme, and feel free to ping me with questions!

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 11, 2010
  great article. save my files.
• Anonymous
  May 03, 2010
  Loved the article.. can you please write an article on Accessibility features of Silverlight?
• Anonymous
  May 05, 2010
  Pooran, I'm glad you found this useful! Mark Rideout has additional in depth information on Accessibility in Silverlight that you should check out when you get a chance; Mix 10' Talk - http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL51, and "Creating Accessibility-aware Silverlight 2 Content" - http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=0810062
• Anonymous
  September 28, 2010
  I really wished that you would address this issue forums.silverlight.net/.../EditPost.aspxI also wish that you would come out with new  training blogs on using silverlight jetpack themes. Your help would be greatly appreciated....