I am trying to understand what is the most streamlined way of customizing the look and feel of my LightSwitch applications.
I have built several WPF and Silverlight applications, and have a common set of brushes, styles, storyboards, images, etc, stored as resources in a dedicated class library. I do not have any user controls of my own - just styles, brushes, templates, etc, that make them look customized.
I chose to build my next application in LightSwitch and I would like to keep the same look and feel as my existing WPF and Silverlight apps. Therefore, I would like to re-use my existing resources.
I explored the Extensibility Toolkit and was able to have access to some of the resources used in LS such as brushes, but did not find where the styles and templates are.
Question #1: Where can I merge my own resource dictionaries to plug in my own styles and templates? For instance, if I have a implicit style for a button, where do I merge it?
In using the toolkit's theme approach, from what I understand, one needs to do the following just to see a modification applied to a LightSwitch application:
a) Build the theme project
b) Uninstall the extension if previously installed
C) Restart Visual Studio
d) Reinstall the updated theme extension
e) Restart Visual Studio
f) Load the LightSwitch solution and run it
Am I missing something? A work around I see is to create a regular Silverlight project and use my own resource library. And once I am satisfied with the look of a particular resource and want to see it in LightSwitch I merge it in the theme and perform the painful process described above.
Question #2: how can I quickly change a theme and see it in action?
Please, what am I missing? I am likely missing something because this cannot be so complicated, since it is so easy in SL and WPF. All I want to do is merge my resource dictionaries somewhere in my LS app and run it to see them in action. Please help! :)