Transparent accent color - silverlight

I want to fade some elements (rectangles and ellipses) from the accent color to transparent using a LinearGradientBrush. However - the transparent color is always a color and it seems like the color "Transparent" is #00FFFFFF - that is white with 0% opacity.
I would like to fade from PhoneAccentColor to PhoneTransparentAccentColor. So if my accent color is red I would like to fade to #00FF0000 and if it is green I would like to fade to #0000FF00.
I can't find any built in color resource for transparent accent so what are my options here? I've tried the options below but with no real success and I can't find much on this topic by normal search channels so I'm not really sure what I'm missing here.
Some suggestions I came up with (however with no real success as stated earlier):
Create a custom resource in code behind and push it into the application wide resource dictionary?
Can I expose a property on my ViewModels with the Color and bind to it?

I can't think of a way to specify a transparent accent color directly with xaml. I do have a couple of possible solutions.
If possible you could animate the opacity of the object rather than the color itself.
Of you could generate the color in code (probably during start up)
var accentColor = (Color)Application.Current.Resources["PhoneAccentColor"];
var transparentAccentColor = accentColor.A = 0;
You could then store the color as a resource and reference it in xaml.
Application.Current.Resources.Add("TransparentPhoneAccentColor", transparentAccentColor);
Hope this helps.

As a general guideline, avoid using gradients on the phone due to the colour support available.
You could try using an OpacityMask in your LinearGradientBrush to achieve your desired results though.
Although not applicable in your case as you're using the accent colour, if you were able to produce images including gradients you should see How can I correct color banding in windows phone 7? for detais on how to avoid banding.

Related

Is it possible to change colour palette on a per window / user control basis?

I am wondering if with the Telerik WPF library it is possible to change colour palette on a per window / usercontrol basis.
For clarity, I am not refering to basic Foreground or Background colours, I am interested in changing colours for certain visual states such mouse over or focused which is not possible to simple change on a control.
In the docs there is a sample for changing a colour palette such as FluentPalette.Palette.BasicColor = (Color)ColorConverter.ConvertFromString("#33000000");.
But this will have an effect on the whole app UI, whereas I am aiming to change the palette on a per window basis.
The way it looks to me, the only option would be to copy the specific theme for each variant (if that's possible at all) each with its colour palette tweaks for each window, which is of course overkill.
Any ideas?

Change border brush from skyblue in wizard control of extended wpf toolkit

I'm using Wizard control of Extended wpf toolkit package.
I would like to change color of the border. See sky blue in image below:
I tried set broder brush\background to wizard\wizard page\window controls, but it failed.
Anybody know how to change it?
Your assistance is appreciated!
Now that you have provided more info, I can see that your question title does not match what you asking to change. You are not asking to change the color of the border of the Wizard Control, you are asking to change the color of the WPF Window.
It takes some time to get things right, and I highly discourage doing this if you app will be used by people with disabilities, who need high contrast, who customized their desktop to a certain color because of color blindness, and the list goes on...Microsoft has worked very hard to address such issues with the defaults.
BUT...you can change this by restyling your Window Style. You can find plenty of code examples.
Here are two:
Can i set the window border color in WPF?
How can I style the border and title bar of a window in WPF?

Canvas background color not as white as I need

I am setting the background color of my Canvas as 'white'. However when I compare my canvas with a vendor application, their canvas is 'whiter', which is the color I want for my canvas too. I have looked at all the color choices available for canvas background color but nothing makes my canvas any whiter than it is. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Simple solution:
Use one of the browser plugins to get the actual "white" color of their app.
One example of a color-picker is Chrome plus the ColorZilla extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colorzilla/bhlhnicpbhignbdhedgjhgdocnmhomnp

How to overlay white text on a white background in WPF so that it is viewable

My WPF VS 2008 application is working with many different images that are assembled and displayed at runtime. I would like to display some white text on top of those images. My problem is that some images contain a white or light color background.
My question is - is it possible to somehow specify a property or specify a setting in the image object, BitmapImage object (where the image is loaded from), or some other WPF object such that when white pixels from one image overlap white pixels from the other image - they turn a different color so the text will be viewable?
I think it depends on how you 'draw' your text on the images. If you use e.g. a Label, you can try out the 'DropShadowEffect', see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms748273.aspx
This effect should work with all WPF objects and you can try out some transparent black soft shadows surrounding the text (a little bit like a glow).
This will only be visible in bright environments if you adjust the opacity right.
Decided to use a dark background color for the text that is only partially (.35) opaque. This means that the background color of the image comes through for the most part, but for lighter colors it yields enough contrast so that the text is viewable.

Dark Background of new WPF Ribbon becomes gradient?

I am using the new Version of MS WPF Ribbon (Version MS WPF Ribbon 3.5.40729.1) with Windows 7 and I am trying to change the Background of the Ribbon. Everything looks fine if I use light background colors.
But e.g. if I choose "Black" a white gradient is shown with the black. It does not seem to be possible to remove the white and simply have a black background. And it looks ugly, especially when every Textcolor normally is white. (Tabheaders get white background and are not readable anymore)
In the samples, (I leave everything as is) if I set Background=Black directly in the ribbon's property, the effect is the same.
What do I have to set or do to get rid of the white gradient color?
There's a hard-coded gloss effect in the RibbonGroup template. It's lame, but the only way to get rid of it is to override the temlate for RibbonGroup. If you have Blend, just extract the template and rip out the offending LinearGradientBrush.

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