Set Control Styles to ThemeResource Values Programmatically In Windows Phone 8.1

Question

I'm adding some controls dynamically in my Windows Phone 8.1 application. In the XAML, you can set various styles to the current theme's style just as I set the foreground attribute of this TextBlock control in the following example.

<TextBlock Text="Hello World" Foreground="{ThemeResource PhoneAccentBrush}" />

I want to be able to do the same thing in the code behind, but have not yet been able to determine how to do this. I create the TextBlock programmatically as follows.

TextBlock textBlock = new TextBlock() {
    Text = "Hello World",
    Foreground = // Need to get phone accent brush from theme
};

I've seen examples where different theme values are stored as follows, but this Dictionary doesn't seem to contain any keys when I checked for theme resources.

SolidColorBrush phoneAccent = new SolidColorBrush((Color)Application.Current.Resources["PhoneAccentColor"]);

Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

Does Rob's answer work when you change the theme during run-time? — DK.
Thanks @tribute2ro, that's an interesting thing to know. I mostly work with Windows applications, so if one-time brush assignment in the code works the same as ThemeResource binding in XAML, there must be a significant difference in themes handling between Win 8.1 and WP 8.1. — DK.

Rob Caplan - MSFT Rob Caplan - MSFT · Accepted Answer · 2015-04-10T02:42:57

Load it from PhoneAccentBrush not PhoneAccentColor:

Brush accentBrush = Resources["PhoneAccentBrush"] as Brush;
TextBlock textBlock = new TextBlock()
{
    Text = "Hello World",
    Foreground = accentBrush 
};

Set Control Styles to ThemeResource Values Programmatically In Windows Phone 8.1

2 Answers