Changing Silverlight Control Appearance with Corrina Barber
June 30th, 2008
Silverlight Skinning
Corrina Barber joins us to talk about the different ways to change appearance in Silverlight.
Skinning Words-
Corrina tells us about the different words used in Skinning. What are they? What do they mean? How are they being used on an everyday basis?
Different Ways–
Corrina talks about the different levels of changing controls. Do you want a movie to play inside of a button? Do you want to change the font of a text control? Do you want to completely change the appearance of a control?
Handoff-
The way that we copy skins between projects isn’t immediately obvious. Corrina tells us how it’s done.
Useful links for the show:
Corrina’s blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/corrinab/
Music for the show:
Lido In The Morning by General Fuzz from the album Messy’s Place
Sidetrack by Lisa DeBenedictis from the album Fruitless
Podcast: Download
Entry Filed under: shows
7 Comments Add your own
1. Michael Sync | July 2nd, 2008 at 1:02 am
Did she tell about switching the theme on the fly? As of now, we are not able to do that. I told about that to Corrina once and she said that she will find out the workaround for that.
2. admin | July 2nd, 2008 at 4:47 am
We didn’t talk specifically about changing things on the fly
I’d imagine that styles can be set on the fly, but apparently I’d be wrong: http://silverlight.net/forums/t/13526.aspx (at least in Beta 1). Still, it seems like there should be some way to do it (without resetting the page).
Actually, that was part of the AOL-Mail-Mix08 demo if I remember correctly. I wonder how they did that….
3. Andy | July 2nd, 2008 at 8:18 am
Oh, yes. We are all wondering how they did that… Even if we could just re-colorize the gradients in our styles.
4. Corrina | July 3rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Switching the theme at runtime is possible in Silverlight 2 beta 2 with some work. What you need to do is programatically swap out the control template for each control (you can’t do this with the style, but you can with the control template), and then walk the style’s properties and then set them one by one for each control in code. I think this is something like what was done for the AOL-Mail demo.
Ping me with any questions, comments, or suggestions you may have
5. admin | July 4th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Corrina! Thanks for the answer. I hadn’t realized that this was a problem previously. But then it started to bug me, and I’m glad to know that there’s a way to do it.
6. Sliverlight Cream for Jul&hellip | July 9th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
[...] issues via Lee. Busy day, so this is a tad late
From SilverlightCream.com: Changing Silverlight Control Appearance with Corrina Barber Erik and Monica Mork interview Corrina Barber in their latest Sparkling Client Podcast… Corrina is [...]
7. B Chase | July 17th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
The ideas behind skinning seem quite good in regard to the flexibility offered to the author. But the reality is that I have yet to see anybody — albeit Corrina is the closest to it — complete a fully functioning skinning example for which datagrid, scrollbars, listboxes all operate correctly or as most users have come to expect. I have spent days at attempting this — but have still fell short. I will have to spend days more.
Expression Blend could be much better in its implementation. I have blown it up 10 times in an hour — but it is about the only tool available in order to accomplish this in day and not weeks.
BTW, Expression Blend must be written in a managed-code environment. Man it is slow!! It is truly hard to believe that it could be C++ code.
In total, I believe that swapping out skins at runtime is far, far down the line of priorities. Better to have an environment in which a truly FULLY workable skin — ready for prime-time — can be built in under a week.
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