For the past few months, Catherine and I have been working on a new product called Xceed Professional Theme Packs for WPF. This product will include all Standard Microsoft controls : Button, RadioButton, Checkbox, ListBox, TreeView, Toolbar, StatusBar etc... and about 30 different controls—all skinned.
The main reason why we decided to develop this product is because of you, our users. We received many comments like : "the WMP11 theme is nice for the DataGrid; however, the rest of my application doesn't fit!". It seemed like the next logical step was to offer a product that would enable our users to give their application a uniformed look. This product does not have a dependancy on Xceed DataGrid for WPF since we can easily imagine users wanting to use this product in any WPF application.
One of the features this product will have is the ability to skin all your controls and still respond to visual properties. For example, having a WMP11 button will completely redo the look of the button; however, we were careful to still support properties like Background and BorderBrush, for example. If you look a the following image, you'll see three different buttons all with the same skin. The only difference between each button is the Background property :
We wanted to enable our users to modify the look of the controls without compromising the skin. To achieve this, we had to exploit TemplateBindings as much as we could. TemplateBindings in a template allow you to chose which VisualElement in your VisualTree will respond to a given property. So in our WMP11 Button template, we added a layer over the gradient brush that gives the WMP11 look. So :
<Rectangle Fill={StaticResource WMP11GradientBurhs}/>
<Rectangle Fill={TemplateBinding Background}
Opacity="0.3"/>
<ContentPresenter />
This is obviously not exactly how our template looks, it's just to give you an idea of how we proceeded. The Rectangle that has the opacity set to 0.3 is the one that is template bound to the background property. This will allow our users to set a color to the control without overriding the grandients as seen in the image.
Here's a quick video demonstrating some of our controls in action :
Not all controls are being displayed but it should give you a general idea of where we're going with this product. One of the toolbars has its background property set to DeepSkyBlue and, as you can see, it still fits with the look of the control.
I'm pretty excited about Xceed getting this product out to you as soon as possible. We are currently in a final polishing phase and hoping for this to be released by the end of the summer. Expect to see 5 different themes with over 30 controls including : Office 2007 Blue, Black and Silver, WMP11, and Glass. Have questions about the control? Feel free to email me at drimonakosm@xceed.com or follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/mattd1980.
