Any suggestions would be appreciated. Does not have to be free.
The Silverlight Toolkit ships with 11 free Silverlight Themes.
Live demo # http://silverlight.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Silverlight%20Toolkit%20Overview%20Part%203
The XAML files themselves also ship with the Silverlight Toolkit download.
On the bottom of the page I've linked to there's a collection of resources on Silverlight Toolkit themes I suggest you take a look at.
Additionally, companies like Nukeation and XamlTemplates ship a very limited collection of commercially available Silverlight Themes. However, those would often not interop natively with 3rd party controls (Silverlight Toolkit controls, ComponentOne, etc).
Expression Gallery Contributions for Silverlight navigation application.
What about
Silverlight Themes, Silverlight Skins, Silverlight Templates
http://silverlight.net/content/samples/sl2/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html
Related
Is that possible to use themes from Silverlight Toolkit in Windows Phone 7 applications?
Or they are only for desktop/web applications and not included in toolkit for WP7?
Is there any tricks that could let me use them in my app?
Theming support is not built into the toolkit for WP7.
The controls in the Phone version of the Toolkit support the configurable themes on the phone. (i.e. Dark/light themes and accent colours.)
If you wanted to do this and had re-templated all the other controls you were using, it shouldn't be that much more work to apply your custom styles to the toolkit controls too.
Windows Phone 7 has adopted a style of theming refered to as Metro. You can get some background on this if you watch CL14 from Mix10.
The resources you can use are covered here.
Theme Resources for Windows Phone
You aren't obliged to follow this theming however and can integrate other styles if you choose to.
Ok,
I figure it out by myself.
All you need to do to use original Silverlight Toolkit themes is to
Get its sources
Take out themes xaml files from them
Place this needed theme as a style for desired control in your WP7 app resouces
Apply new style to desired control.
I'm looking for something like a pdf or anything else that would show a chart of available controls in SL and/or WPF.
Ideally, the chart should have a drawing of the control, some succinct description and the hierarchy if possible.
Has anyone seen such a thing? Freeware or Payware, can even be from a book I could buy.
The following MSDN link lists the controls within the Silverlight SDK:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189048(VS.95).aspx
You can try the sdk controls live following this link:
http://samples.msdn.microsoft.com/Silverlight/SampleBrowser/#/?sref=HomePage
The controls within the Silverlight Toolkit can be found here:
http://silverlight.codeplex.com/
Also, there are plenty of third party controls for Silverlight. The following link contains a list to some of them (free or not):
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/28/comprehensive-list-of-silverlight-controls.aspx
The controls that are shipped with the platform are fairly straightforward, so I'm not sure that would even make sense - i.e. the basic buttons, input box, text block, etc.
As for the controls that are shipped with the Toolkit, which is the richer feature set released out of band in relation to the Silverlight trunk, you can preview everything you asked for here:
http://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl4/toolkitcontrolsamples/run/default.html
What's more, the source code for the preview is included with the tool kit so it's very easy to see how any of those controls were used.
I just downloaded the nice themes collection from the Codeplex WPF Themes site. I like the WhisterBlue and BureauBlue themes a lot, but neither contain any styles for the new controls included in the WPF Toolkit (DataGrid, DatePicker, and Calendar).
It seems like someone out there must have extended the themes to cover these controls, but I've had no luck finding them. So, if you have any leads, I'd love to hear them.
I should also mention that I've been trying to port a Silverlight version of the BureauBlue DataGrid theme to WPF (see: How do you port a theme from Silverlight to WPF?), but that has been quite unsuccessful so far.
WPFreakyStyley has extended all of its themes to the WPF Toolkit. You might be able to find one that matches the CodePlex theme you're using.
WPFreakyStyley
The WhistlerBlue theme is included in the Silverlight toolkit Oct 2009 in the preview band.
Actipro Software has a free, opensource project on CodePlex called the "WPF Control Contrib". It contains code that extends the functionality of the built-in DataGrid and includes five themes for the DataGrid: AeroNormal, Classic, LunaHomestead, LunaMetallic and LunaNormal
High Robotics has free WPF theme that can be applied to apps and does not have dolly glossy style.
But it requires at least WPF.NET 4 (WPF Toolkit was included in that version).
Also here is discussion about free wpf themes (MahApps.Metro, nukeaction and others).
Do you know any good WPF control library (even commercial) and what experiences have you made with them?
Telerik has a commercial line of WPF controls, as well as WinForms, and Silverlight. They are very high quality, and on the high end in terms of $$$, but they're worth their weight in gold if you're going to utilize them.
I've used their web products and they are well made. They even have sample code on their site and demos so you can get started easily.
Odyssey is a nice set of controls with a Ribbon menu control and Outlook-style bars.
You may have problems using them in XBAP applications though.
DevExpress have a rich set as well.
Infragistics has some excellent WPF and WinForm controls (commercial). I'll admit I have only used their WinForm controls, but if their WPF controls are anything similar, they will be great.
I have a Silverlight application that is built from a set of Silverlight class libraries. I would like to create a common Silverlight library that contains a set of resources used to define the styles used for all the Silverlight UI libraries. This would be simlar to the <Styles>'s defined in the node within App.xaml file.
Is this possible? And if so, how would I implement?
While this is possible using WPF (via Dynamic Resources, see this video and fast forward to 12:00), I don't think this is possible yet in Silverlight. The closest thing you have to this is the themes in the Silverlight toolkit. There is a comment on that page by the team stating that you can't change themes (or resource styles) at runtime in Silverlight 2:
unruledboy, We do not support changing themes at run-time as this is not an ability supported by the Silverlight framework.
So I think themes is the closest thing available right now.