Standardising Styles Accross Multiple Applications
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Hi All, Not been around here for a few weeks as I've just become a Dad!! Anyway ... I'm just looking for a few pointers and wotnot on how best to approach this task. I'm currently starting work on my second WPF application for my employer and one thing I want to do is before moving either project forward any more is to standardise the look and feel between the two (and obviously any future applications). Also this means that other developers here can just plug in a set of standard styles and get to work on the logic rather than worrying about the look and feel (my job largely!). The most obvious way would be to have a 'Styles' project in a separate Visual Source Safe project with a <controlname>.xaml file for each control (like combo.xaml, textbox.xaml etc) ... or just one large style.xaml containing all our style code (this could however become a very large single file!). What I'm wondering is before I start on this as a project in its own right is there a better way than just having xaml files? Would it make sense to build a style.dll that could be plugged into any application that would only provide styles and control templates for consumption by other developers? We are using the Infragistics controls here and they provide a similar approach whereby we could build theme.dll's for our users to then select a theme for their instance of our application. I think that from a consumption point of view that is a much neater solution. Thanks in advance for any input.
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :) My Blog
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Hi All, Not been around here for a few weeks as I've just become a Dad!! Anyway ... I'm just looking for a few pointers and wotnot on how best to approach this task. I'm currently starting work on my second WPF application for my employer and one thing I want to do is before moving either project forward any more is to standardise the look and feel between the two (and obviously any future applications). Also this means that other developers here can just plug in a set of standard styles and get to work on the logic rather than worrying about the look and feel (my job largely!). The most obvious way would be to have a 'Styles' project in a separate Visual Source Safe project with a <controlname>.xaml file for each control (like combo.xaml, textbox.xaml etc) ... or just one large style.xaml containing all our style code (this could however become a very large single file!). What I'm wondering is before I start on this as a project in its own right is there a better way than just having xaml files? Would it make sense to build a style.dll that could be plugged into any application that would only provide styles and control templates for consumption by other developers? We are using the Infragistics controls here and they provide a similar approach whereby we could build theme.dll's for our users to then select a theme for their instance of our application. I think that from a consumption point of view that is a much neater solution. Thanks in advance for any input.
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :) My Blog
First of all, congratulations. Boy or girl? Secondly, we use a set of themes and load them in dynamically. The advantage of this is that we can change/upgrade applications merely by changing the themes. It's a convenient way to "freshen" up an application without having to manage lots of different codebases.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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First of all, congratulations. Boy or girl? Secondly, we use a set of themes and load them in dynamically. The advantage of this is that we can change/upgrade applications merely by changing the themes. It's a convenient way to "freshen" up an application without having to manage lots of different codebases.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
Hey Pete, Its a lil girl! So cool ... How do you store all the theme code though? Are you using DLLs that are distributed with your applications? How do you manage that within a multi developer environment?
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :) My Blog
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Hey Pete, Its a lil girl! So cool ... How do you store all the theme code though? Are you using DLLs that are distributed with your applications? How do you manage that within a multi developer environment?
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :) My Blog
Jammer wrote:
Are you using DLLs that are distributed with your applications?
Yup.
Jammer wrote:
How do you manage that within a multi developer environment?
By having a designer come up with the themes.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
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Jammer wrote:
Are you using DLLs that are distributed with your applications?
Yup.
Jammer wrote:
How do you manage that within a multi developer environment?
By having a designer come up with the themes.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
-
Jammer wrote:
Are you using DLLs that are distributed with your applications?
Yup.
Jammer wrote:
How do you manage that within a multi developer environment?
By having a designer come up with the themes.
Deja View - the feeling that you've seen this post before.
Thanks for this Pete, I've pretty much got a working style.dll done now. Lots of tweaking to do and wotnot but this is indeed a seriously neat solution. Just a quick one, do you have any neat tricks that you found on your journey down this route?
Jammer Going where everyone here has gone before! :) My Blog