Implementing themes in Silverlight 4 apps.

Question

I have a 2 part question:

1. Is there anything more to implementing themes than simply placing a <toolkit:BlahBlahBlahTheme> tag around all your content?

2. What is the pattern for switching out themes at runtime? Is there such a thing?

Answer 1

Themes in Silverlight 4 are implemented implicitly by including the styles in your assets and adding them as resources in your app.xaml file.

The best way to see it in action is to grab an existing app with a theme and see how it's done. Better yet, there are now standard 2010 templates for some new themes, see them here on Tim Heuers blog

http://timheuer.com/blog/

As for loading them dynamically, yes you can http://www.ganshani.com/2009/12/16/dynamic-theme-in-silverlight-3/