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• Jose Luis Latorre commented  ·  June 1, 2010 3:10 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Hi Herzmeister, Toolkit themes are just plain XAML that doesn't support behaviors and custom assets as images, video, audio or other elements. It could be good that they were able to be defined in multiple XAML files using a MergedDictionary too.

  If they did, they could be a good option, as you say :).

• herzmeister der welten commented  ·  May 31, 2010 6:44 a.m.  ·  Delete

  The toolkit has a theming framework. They are based on a Theme base class and dynamic switching is supported now with the Toolkit for Silverlight 4, and it's easy too. I don't know though why those new Metro and Win7 themes are not built upon on tha Toolkit framework. It's not difficult to integrate them though.

• Jose Luis Latorre commented  ·  May 31, 2010 4:43 a.m.  ·  Delete

  For now, the way to “handle” all this themes is to manually place a series of files in a folder of "Assets" which if done right includes various styles files, resource libraries, behaviors - see http://storage.timheuer .com/newthemes-structure1.png for a clearer picture - also this themes can incorporate any Font, image or video, according to the style in question.
  This in itself is rather large achievement as we can decouple the interaction of styles and is relatively simple .... for a Developer ... for a "pure" designer this is complex and costs understanding and concentration...
  I am proposing an evolution of this already great proposal, to make it greater..this is to further simplify the interaction model for the themes which enables to create and work on them separately, uncoupling them from the application, assigning them its own “theme” project type, like “cosmopolitan.theme.dll” wich is nothing else than a Silverlight class library with a assigned dll.
  This way, a designer can create a theme library like “Cosmopolitan.theme.dll"and the application can change the theme at any time using the theme dll without the need of having to delete files of styles, behaviors, images, fonts, etc ... (which costs time and is prone to errors).

  I have explained the proposal more in depth at http://silverlightguy.com/2010/05/31/new-themes-launched-for-silverlight-4-this-is-great-but-is-enough/