Windows System Color Theme for Silverlight - Part Three

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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... 

High Contrast Theme Image

 

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!