Custom Colors in the Windows Live Web Controls

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The Windows Live Web Controls now support custom colors!  The Windows Live Contacts web control and Windows Live Spaces web control now accept additional parameters to specify the text and background colors of the inner and outer regions of the controls so that you can "skin" the controls to more naturally blend in with your web site's color scheme.

So you can now do this:

We use the term "inner" and "outer" because the inner region serves slightly different purposes in the different controls.  In the Contacts Control's list view, the inner region is the listbox containing the scrollable list of contacts.  In tile view, it's a list of contact photo tiles.  In the Spaces Control, it's a list of photo thumbnails.

The Windows Live logo banner is now a transparent PNG with an alpha blended halo to provide contrast against any background color.

The color parameters are:

  • OuterBackgroundColor
  • OuterTextColor
  • InnerBackgroundColor
  • InnerTextColor
  • LinkColor

These color parameters determine the screen color for everything in the controls displayed in-situ on your host page except for the submit button, the scrollbar, the piping and the Windows Live logo.  Popup windows for Windows Live login or user confirmations, error messages, and user prompts are not affected by custom colors.

The color values you can assign to these color parameters follow the W3C CSS color specification:  15 color names, plus hexadecimal notation (#FFFFFF), plus RGB octets notation ("rgb(255,255,255)").

The "try*" demo apps have also been updated to help you configure the colors interactively and see how they look:  trycontactscontrol, trypresencecontrol, trystoragecontrol

Enjoy!