Custom Themes for Windows Phone 8.1

Question

After writing my application I started testing different scenarios. When I changed my theme background from dark to light from system settings, some of the controls in the pages changed color accordingly. As I am using ThemeResources that is a normal behavior but that made the pages quiet unusable as most of them were designed according to a dark background.

So I started searching the net about themes in order to implement my own theme and fix the issue. Unfortunately I was unable to find a good solution after my research and stuck with some questions about creating custom themes for my application.

Firstly is there a way to override the system theme. For example even though user selects the light theme can I apply the dark theme in my application. I want to support system themes in the future but not in the beginning so being able to do that would ease my work greatly.

Secondly what is the best way of creating a new theme. While searching for a solution I read that copying a whole theme from generic.xaml and working on it with a new key is an easy solution. Is it OK to that, is it a good practice?

Lastly if I create multiple themes, say blue and red, is there a way to fetch these theme names programmatically using C#.

As always thanks for all your helps.

I found the answer to my first question in stackoverflow.com/a/17583108/252738. — Birkan Cilingir
As for the second and next question I think you can take a look at this answer - it basically shows how to create ThemeDistionaries in xaml. I'll do what you want this way - define resources for themes. — Romasz

cvsingh cvsingh · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-21T09:17:27

First Question: Yes You can also do so by using following snippet... you have to override RequestedTheme here

<Application x:Class="App2.App"
 xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
 xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
 xmlns:local="using:App2"
 RequestedTheme="Dark">
</Application>

Second Question: Yes this is good way for beginners.

For More info visit this

Custom Themes for Windows Phone 8.1

1 Answers