I'm having some issues trying to change the look / style of a combo box in Expression Blend / WPF. While there are tutorials out there describing setting styles for buttons, there seem to be a few wrinkles with ComboBox controls.
Can anyone offer any advice, or point me towards good tutorials that cover re-styling something more complex than a button?
The ComboBox style template has 3 parts to it.
The ContentPresenter you should have come across styling Buttons.
There is a Part_Popup that you should find easy to change properties on and style.
The last part is a ToggleButton, to style that you need to "edit a copy" again and create another new style template for the ToggleButton.
Have a look at BeaCostas SolarSytem Listbox it's a lovely piece of work.
Related
I am really bad when it comes to styling in XAML and I have a really big problem. I want to customize my scrollviewer in the ListBox that I have. I want to look something as simple as this
I hope that someone can help me do this.
Thanks in advance.
If you're using Expression Blend this is pretty simple actually. First you need to get to your Control Template for your ScrollBar. You can do this by dropping a ScrollBar control on your Design Surface then right-click and choose "Edit Template -> Edit A Copy" which will present a box to enter the name of your new Style Template and whether you want to save it to a Resource Dictionary or to the file you're working in.
Once you have saved it you should see multiple Parts in your Objects & Timeline panel for the Vertical & Horizontal templates of your ScrollBar. You will be editing the properties of the Rectangles & Borders that create the visual of your Scrollbar within each Control Template for Horizontal & Vertical depending on which you choose to use.
To re-create your example should be relatively easy with finding the "VerticalThumbTemplate" or "HorizontalThumbTemplate" and editing the Border / Rectangles within them to get your oval as you display. You might also want to tinker with your VisualStateManager States while you're in there for MouseOver effects etc.
An example of a custom scrollbar can be found in a partial theme I created awhile back you can view here.
Once you have created your custom ScrollBars you can either make your new style template the default by changing the BasedOn Value for that TargetType, or applying it directly to the ScrollViewer built in to your ListView Template.
Hopefully this should be enough to get you started in the right direction. Cheers! :)
Scrollbar is one of the harder template to customize. If your are really bad at that, you maybe have to search at a custom controls librarie.
But if you really want to edit the scrollbar template, there is plenty of sites that will help you with a simple google search
I'm looking for an easy way to change the styling of the expander button in the Silverlight Toolkit Expander control. For example:
Smaller or larger icon.
Replace the icon with another one.
Change the colours of the icon being used.
TIA
Craig
What you're describing is essentially the bread & butter of what Expression Blend is good for. In Blend you would just right-click your control and choose to edit a copy of the template. Then you would find the Toggle Button, and then edit THAT template.
Otherwise, you'll need to find the Control Template for the expander in your ToolkitStyles.xaml though it's much easier with Expression Blend though. You'll find Templates for all four directions an expander and go.
A quick solution search for;
<Style TargetType="toolkit:Expander" x:Key="DefaultExpanderStyle">
Should produce your default template you can either edit directly or make a copy of (just make sure to rename the Key name if you copy it) and that way you have all your States & Transitions etc already also. Remember your culprit will be the embedded ToggleButton inside the template for whichever direction expander you're wanting to edit.
Hope this helps.
I have seen this post: WPF ComboBox: background color when disabled
and some others...
But This solution causes me some problems. All I want is to make the textBox gray, and the ComboBoxItems gray and not selectable. I don't want to recreate all the style as the control won't work properly on both XP and seven. I don't want to choose one style for both, but I want XP style for XP and seven style for seven.
Is there a way to set the style so I can change the Background of the ComboBoxItems when the comboBox is Readonly?
Thanks in advance!
Update: It seems that the Drop down popup should be restyled instead. I got to find how.
I finally found my answer at many places on the web, pieces by pieces. The ComboBox style is composed of other controls. The PopUp is the one that interests me. It is not public, so I can't modify it as I want. It would have been interesting to define a style for my popup and to replace the original popup by it, but it is not accessible, so... I attempted to make a template that inherits from the template of the original ComboBox, but that is not possible neither. It won't accept inheritance for some good reasons How to Inherit a Control Template. So the template must be remade totally or not. The other option would be to make my own control that inherits from combobox and that changes the items to gray and not selectable when the combobox is readonly (into the code), but this is not a good idea in my situation. No solution for me. I will have to stick with the whole template redifinition. I hope this post will help someone in some way!
I have an Expander in Silverlight 4 that I am trying to style. Specifically, I want to override the default look of the ToggleButton used in the Expander. How do I go about doing this? I've written some style for the Expander so far, but I can seem to find the place to override the default ToggleButton style.
This MSDN page gives a pretty complete description of what is needed to override the Expander.
If you have Expression Blend, another option is to start a new project in Blend, insert an expander on your window/usercontrol, then right-click on it and choose 'Edit Template'. Then you can change just the pieces you want. For my needs, this functionality in Blend is worth the cost of this software by itself.
You will need to replace the whole expander template since the expander stores the togglebutton templates (it has one for each direction) in its template and offers no way for you to provide your own.
I did some searching but it wasn't what I was looking for. So, does anyone know a way how to style the validation tooltip in Silverlight(the thing in the green border)?
alt text http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/222/validationtooltip.png
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Best Regards,
~K
Unfortunately you can't easily provide a style for the validation tooltip without effectively styling the entire Textbox control. Blend makes this fairly easy if you are familiar with using that design tool. However if your a dyed in the wool coder like me then...
Goto this page on MSDN TextBox Styles and Templates
Copy the vsm namespace alias to your UserControl xaml
Copy the TextBox style into UserControls.Resources give it at an x:Key name (say MyTextBoxStyle")
Copy the ValidationToolTipTemplate from the web page to the UserControls.Resources, paste it above the TextBox style. It already has an x:Key name that the TextBox style will be referencing.
Add Style="{StaticResource MyTextBoxStyle}" to your TextBox in the data grid.
Now you play around with the validation elements of the templates to get your desired result.
The validation messages are displayed as a visual state. you can get to these (and edit them) as templates directly from blend.