Skip to main content

WPF - Setting Up Themes

Forcing WPF to use a specific Windows theme | I Got Rhythm

At a client recently, we developed our WPF application under Windows 7, tested it under Windows XP and everything looked great. 
Then it was deployed.
As it turns out, one of the deployments was over a Citrix server that forced applications to run under Classic mode. 
Those of you who have worked with various operating systems over the years will know what I'm talking about. Classic mode isn't quite classic, unless you are one of the few who think playing bar pong on an 84" TV is superior to playing one of the more dimensional games. Or maybe one of the few who like to get up and change the TV channel rather than finding the remote. Or one of the .... (you get the idea)
While most things converted well, Tabs do not. In WPF, we have these beautiful tabs that look fresh but over in Classic mode, they have the look and feel of, well, Classic Windows 95 and VB 6 applications.
The application was demo'd to the client under Windows 7 but deployed under Windows Classic so all of a sudden, the user's experience went from "wow, that looks great" to "what kind of crap did you give me".
But all was not lost. I found this very old (2006) but super useful post about forcing WPF to use a theme. In the end, it was as simple as adding a forced reference to PresentationFramework.Aero in the solution and adding

  <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>

        <ResourceDictionary Source="/PresentationFramework.Aero;component/themes/Aero.NormalColor.xaml" />

    </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries

to the Resource dictionary (or to the Application.xaml file).

Voila our tabs went from crap to zap!

To make the experience even more sweet, that post from 2006? The blog is still being updated today (a lot more posts than here recently as well). Well done, Aelij Arbel, well done and Thank you!

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Merry Christmas

Whether you celebrate now, have already celebrated your past holiday, are planning to, or not, I hope you find yourself surrounded by family and those you love during this holiday season and are able to remember fondly those who are not with you. We often find ourselves buried in work, or too distracted by other problems, to share and remember a few moments with those closest to us. So many of us are separated by huge distances, we often find it easier to focus on those who are out of arm's reach yet so easy to connect with online, instead of those who are right beside us. So do yourself a favour, put down the keyboard (stylus, mouse, etc) and spend that time. I know I will. Merry Christmas. Powered by ScribeFire .
4 comments
Read more

Who Wants To Be Logical? I Do! I Don't! (with Claude)

In my book, Towards Consciousness, I explore PET , a theory that attempts to explain consciousness and possibly how it might apply to AI. As part of the conversations with AI series, I've included this conversation with Claude.AI in which we were talking about something very different and yet the conversation redirected itself back to PET. For the record, there is no such thing as "Colfsity". A It's interesting to me that people want to proclaim their distinction from being rigid and unlike machines, yet they also complain that the "best" people keep a rigid schedule, regular routines and logic understanding of issues. That's a perceptive observation about a real tension in how people think about themselves and what they value. There does seem to be this paradox where rigidity is simultaneously rejected as "robotic" or inhuman, yet praised when it appears as discipline, consistency, or logical thinking. I think part of what's happening is t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Programmers vs. Developers vs. Architects

I received an email this morning from Brandon Savage 's newsletter. Brandon's a PHP guru (works at Mozilla) but his newsletter and books have some great overall perspectives for developers of all languages. However, this last one (What's the difference between developers and architects?) kind of rubs me the wrong way. Either that, or I've just missed the natural inflation of job descriptions. (maybe, it's like the change in terminology between Garbage man and Waste Engineer or Secretary and Office Administrator) So maybe it's just me - but I think there's still a big difference between Programmer, Developer and then of course, architect. The key thing here is that every role has a different perspective and every one of those perspectives has value. The original MSF create roles like Product Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Tester, etc - so every concept may pigeon hole people into different roles. But the statements Brandon makes are often distinction...
11 comments
Read more