WPF: Restyle all controls with scroll bars

Question

How can I change the style -ONCE- for the scrollbars shown by all controls (listbox, treeview, scrollbarviewer, richtextbox, etc...)?

Answer 1

If you will define your Style for a control with no x:Key attribute, it will be applied for all instances of that control.

Try like this:

<Window.Resources>
    <Style TargetType="ScrollBar">
        <Setter Property="Background" Value="Red"/>
    </Style>
</Window.Resources>
<Grid>
    <TextBox Margin="24,12,0,0" VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Visible" AcceptsReturn="True" Height="28" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="89" />
    <ScrollBar Name="scroll" HorizontalAlignment="Right" />
</Grid>

Here you can see that the Style is defined for ScrollBar control and have no x:Key attribute defined so it gets applied to the each ScrollBar instance within Window. Like ScrollBar of TextBox and ScrollBar named scroll also.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Thanks. Finally the problem was solved by setting the style in the Themes/Generic.xaml and (because of custom controls existing in another assembly with they respective resources merged) adding the following to App.xaml...

<Application.Resources>
  <ResourceDictionary>
    <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
      <ResourceDictionary Source="Themes/Generic.xaml"/>
      <ResourceDictionary Source="MyCtls/MyRes.xaml" />
    </ResourceDictionary>
</Application.Resources>

The key point is to merge the Generic.xaml file. Also, if the resource dictionary is in another assembly, it must be referenced as...

<ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/OtherAssembly;component/MyCtls/MyRes.xaml"/>