WPF Tutorial : Styles, Triggers and Animations : 7

Introduction

Perhaps the most interesting and most important feature for any WPF application is Styling. Styling means defining styles for controls, and store in reusable ResourceDictionaries and hence forth, it could be used later on by calling its name. Styles in WPF could be well compared with CSS styles. They are both similar in most of the cases, while the former extends the feature allowing most of the features which WPF have. In this article I will discuss mostly how you could use Style in your WPF application to enhance the Rich experience of your UI.

Style

WPF exposes a property Style for every Control. If you look into the object Hierarchy, the Style is basically a property which exposes an object of Style in FrameworkElement. So each object can associate it and define custom setters to manipulate the basic look and feel of a control.

Clearly, the above diagram shows the association of Style in FrameworkElement and from the object hierarchy every control somehow inherits from FrameworkElement and hence style will be available to it. Style is also a WPF object which is inherited form DispatcherObject which helps in setting different properties of your UI Element.

How Style differs from Theme  ?

Before we move further into Styles lets talk about Themes. Theme is totally different from Styles. Themes are defined at OS level, or more precisely a Theme can take part of delivering styles all over the Desktop while Styles are restricted to the contextual area of a WPF window. WPF are capable of retrieving the color scheme which is defined in OS level. Say for instance, if you do not define style for your application, the elements in the screen will automatically get styles from external environment. Say for instance, in XP if you change the theme to something else you would see that the buttons, TextBox on your WPF window will change its color instantly. You can even set the Theme which the application would use programmatically from your code.

What about Templates ?

Every control defines a ControlTemplate. A ControlTemplate defines the overall structure of the control. As I have already told you, say for instance you have a Button. Button is a control that is made up of more than one control. It would have a ContentPresenter which writes the Text over the control, it would have a Rectangle which keeps the boundary of the Button etc. So Template is a special property associated with a Control which specifies how the control will look like structurally. We can easily define our Template and change the overall structure of a control.

Templates are basically of 2 types :

1. ControlTemplate
2. DataTemplate

ControlTemplate defines the structure of the Control. It means say for instance, you define the ControlTemplate for a ComboBox. So from ControlTemplate you can easily change the Button associated with the ComboBox which opens the DropDown, you can change the structure of the TextBox, the Popup etc. So ControlTemplate allows you to change the overall structure of the Control.



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