In ‘L’ is for Lookless, I introduce WPF’s lookless control model and examine what it means to style and template a control in WPF. I also talk about the importance of keeping the default Windows theme files on hand as a general reference for control styling and templating.
Now that WPF 4 has officially released (as part of Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0), it is a good time to update your WPF theme files.
The latest theme files can be downloaded here.
Not a lot has changed in the templates of the existing controls… mostly just fixes (e.g., dynamic bindings to system colors for border strokes).
The real benefit to the new theme files is that the updated styles demonstrate how to enable some of the new WPF 4 features (like ClearType text rendering and ScrollViewer panning in response to touch input).
There are also a few new controls (DatePicker, DataGrid, etc) that have officially moved out of the WPF Toolkit on CodePlex and into the framework. The updated theme files provide a good reference for styling and templating these new controls.