I just noticed that Peter has put up a post on how to make a Windows Phone 7 application theme aware. I couldn’t help but recall one of the more obscure side comments in one of the MIX sessions where the presenter commented out a bunch of code in the App.xaml file in order to get theming to work correctly. Anyhow, if you’re interested the section of xaml to comment out is the following:
<!– Brush Resources –>
<!–<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneAccentBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneAccentColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneBackgroundBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneBackgroundColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneContrastForegroundBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneContrastForegroundColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneForegroundBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneInactiveBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneInactiveColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneDisabledBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneDisabledColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneSubtleBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneSubtleColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneContrastBackgroundBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneContrastBackgroundColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneTextBoxBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneTextBoxColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneBorderBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneBorderColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="PhoneTextSelectionBrush" Color="{StaticResource PhoneTextSelectionColor}"/>
<SolidColorBrush x_Key="TransparentBrush" Color="Transparent"/>—>
You should be aware that this effectively breaks the current design experience within Visual Studio and can even cause the IDE to crash. I actually closed all my open documents before making this change and then un-commented the xaml once I was done testing the theme support.
Anyhow, here’s a (poorly designer) test application that shows the Light theme option:
