TextBox Style issue for Panorama with dark image background - silverlight

I have a WP7 panorama application that uses a dark image for the panorama's background. The issue is when the device is set to light theme. The issue root cause is the Focus state transition animation for the TextBox sets the background color to transparent.
Since my panorama is always dark I'd like my textbox to always be white background.
First attempt set textbox background to white.
FAIL: transition changes background back to transparent when textbox gets focus.
Next attempt programmatically set textbox background to white on gotfocus.
FAIL: transition changes background back to transparent when textbox gets focus.
Next attempt override control template and change transition.
FAIL: never could get this happy with WP7, not sure if I used right version
Next attempt override control template using Blend 4.
FAIL: might have missed something but every state looked correct.
I see where lots of others are having this same problem but no here's exactly what you need to do so you don't trip up some minor detail.
If you can help us with a solution please do share.
Here's what I tried with Blend 4.
Opened my project in Blend 4, selected my textbox, right-clicked on it, chose Edit Template, and then Edit a Copy.
Here's where I'm not exactly sure what I need to do.
I went to FocusStates, and selected Focused. What I see in the preview pane looks like what I want. A nice textbox with a white background.
I look on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645061%28v=vs.95%29.aspx and I see there is a storyboard animation for the various FocusStates and I figure in WP7 there must be one that makes textboxes have a transparent background when they have focus in the light theme.
My goal of making my textbox have a white background since I have a panorama with a dark background image has proven difficult to say the least.

You were on the right path with this retemplating the control in blend. You can control formating of each constituent component of the control and for each state.
If you're still having trouble with this, post your resulting xaml for the TextBox in your question once you've made the changes.
Re your edit: Focused -> Grid-EnabledBorder-Background uses static resource PhoneTextBoxEditBackgroundBrush. You can change this to a local value then choose your colour.

Related

Silverlight button background image change while switching button State

I am having an issue about buttons in silverlight on windows phone 7. My button has a background image, and as I press it, it goes white like all the buttons in wp7 by default. What I want it to do, is to change its background image to different one. I found topic that describes something quite similar, but regarding the button color Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Change a button's background color on click.
Problem is that whenever I adjust any of the basic styles (Pressed, Disabled etc), I can only change everything besides the background image, because when I change it for one style, it stays changed for all the rest of them.
How can I make button change its background image while going into Pressed state? And why cant I do it the way the above link says?
ImageButton for Wp7 http://silvergeek.net/2011/01/14/imagebutton-control-for-win-phone-7/
If its not exactly what you need it might give you some hints.

Image Button with no border that works like a toolbar button?

I want a button that
Displays an image with NO border, NO background, NO text
If I tab into the imagebutton, THEN it shows the background and border
Also if I hover over it, it shows the background and border
I've searched and I've tried so many different things, but nothing it exactly what I want. I've tried setting various properties on the button to make the background and border transparent, but it still shows up. I've tried a style with a custom control template. I'd rather not have to completely reinvent all the triggers etc to get the button to render on mouse over. The biggest problem with custom control template is that then I loose all existing functionality and I'm basically building a new control from the ground up.
Here is another link that came closest to what I wanted but it doesn't properly work for me.
How do you completely remove the button border in wpf? - BUT.... for some reason the hover effect gets stuck. One I mouse over the image and the button border draws, it stays stuck on until I click somewhere else.
Actually, you will want to override the control template. You're not "losing" any functionality (aside from the UI triggers).
Original/Default Template -- This is a good starting point... copy/paste that into you're XAML (wherever you want to style this button... ie Button resources, UserControl/Window resources, App Resources?). From there make your adjustments.
Another easy way is to use Expression Blend. You can easily create a new template based on the existing template, and the styling/authoring tools it provides are much better than hand-coding XAML (unless you're good at doing that).
As far as displaying an image instead of text, just set the image as the content. A Button is a type of ContentControl which means that it can house any type of content (Object).

How to achieve a transparent BackColor on an original WinForms control?

I'm about to lose my mind here.
Why won't the checkbox control blend with what's behind it?
The question applies to all WinForms controls, but I'm using this as an example.
A picture is worth a thousand words:
And a few more words:
What's behind the CheckBox are colored PictureBoxes and a Button.
The CheckBox's BackColor is set to Transparent. But somehow it decides that that means it should share the BackColor of the containing Form (is that its idea of the illusion of transparency?).
Is this not possible in WinForms? I could swear I did this before.
UPDATE:
I just tried this:
On that form, set the CheckBox's BackColor to Transparent, then change the BackColor of the containing Form to some other color, and the CheckBox will match that BackColor. What the.......?
This is a side effect of controls being Windows windows. A window is responsible for drawing itself, the OnPaintBackground and OnPaint methods take care of that.
This rendering model doesn't support transparency well. There is support for true transparency by using layered windows. That's implemented by the video adapter, Windows uses it hardware overlay feature. But that only works for toplevel windows, not child windows. Note the Form.Opacity and Form.TransparencyKey properties.
There's partial support for transparency through a trick. A control can fake it by asking the parent window to draw itself first inside the control window. That produces the background pixels, it can then draw on top of that. Setting the BackColor property to Color.Transparent enables this trick for controls that support this. All of the ButtonBase derived classes do. But not controls that are wrappers for native Windows controls.
"Asking the parent window" is where the flaw in this trick becomes visible in your screen shot. You are seeing the form pixels. Stacking effects don't work, it never considers any intermediary window in the Z-order, only the parent. This is fixable but very ugly, there's a KB article that show the code.
Also notable is that WPF doesn't have this restriction. Controls are not windows, they render by painting themselves on top of the parent. Layers of paint. Transparency is now trivial, just don't paint.
Bob Powell has written an excellent article about transparent controls. Check it out:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141227200000/http://bobpowell.net/transcontrols.aspx
Can you set the backcolor of the checkbox manually to the color you want? (The value in the picturebox behind it)
'Transparent' may mean something different from what you want to MS.
Also, try changing the zorder of the pictureboxes (bring to front) and see if that changes the checkbox's underlying color.

How do I remove the focus rectangle from a silverlight textbox control

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can remove the focus rectangle from a silverlight textbox? (I'm talking about the blue rectangle that appears when you click on the texblock to start typing)
I'm looking through the default style and template for the textbox but can't seem to figure out which element to tweak.
Thanks!
In the template you will find a border called FocusVisualElement. In the base and Unfocused Visual State it has an opacity of 0%. In the focused Visual state it has 100% opacity. You can simply delete the FocusVisualElement if you don't want any border indicating the focus.
This probably looks weird when the MouseOverBorder still appears so you might want to delete that too from the Template, however move the ContentElement it holds to the parent Grid first.
Alternatively you could set the Opacity to 0% for these borders in all states.

WPF changing button background color when the window is disabled

I have a button with a transparent background on a wpf window.
Problem is, when I open up another window with a .showdialog the form becomes disabled as does the button, causing the button to go white (and stick out like a sore thumb); the same happens to the listview and textbox controls. Labels and group boxes aren't impacted in this way and remain looking fine.
How do I preserve the transparency color of the button, listview and textboxes when they are disabled?
Thanks, Rob
I'm not sure what your button template looks like, I would recommend posting your XAML. But check out the MSDN Docs on Button Templating

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