windows phone 8 theme override of default theme not working

Question

Hi im Currently developing a App for a Customer and the Customer wants a specific theme that matches there company colors.

and i am now trying to override the default themes so the customers theme will always be the ones used. I have currently tried the way from these sites :

http://www.geekchamp.com/articles/windows-phone-mango-custom-application-theme-step-by-step

and also some suggestions from these :

How to force to use light theme in Windows Phone 7? http://matthiasshapiro.com/2011/01/17/theme-forcing-for-windows-phone-7-silverlight/

these are some old post indeed but most should be the same in Windows phone 8

i cant get any of these to work even with moving the ThemeResource,xaml to the project and link it like wise :

<Application.Resources>
    <ResourceDictionary>
        <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
            <ResourceDictionary Source="Resources/ThemeResources.xaml" />
        </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
    </ResourceDictionary>        
</Application.Resources>

it stil uses the phones default theme Dark.

how ever i found out that if you don't use the default variables names like : PhoneBackgroundBrush

and use you own naming conventions then this works. I would prefer to just override the default variable names.

my problem is very like this on this post : Custom Theme That Overrides Default Theme WP7

Is there Really no way to override the default theme and its Variables or am i forced to make my own and go through all my controls to use my own naming convention ?

any help is very much appreciated.

regards maddragon151

Answer 1

Try the Phone Theme Manager.

http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2012/01/phonethememanager/
http://metronuggets.com/2012/07/07/set-custom-themes-in-windows-phone/

You don't have to add the source to your project if you install it using NuGet (search for "PhoneThemeManager").

It works well on WP8 to set light/dark theme and accent color. I have not tried a full custom theme, which is said to be supported.

---

Richard Woo

Answer 2

Have you tried WP Theme manager: https://github.com/jeffwilcox/wp-thememanager?

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-Eric.

Answer 3

hi Thanks for your replies both :) it did not know about this nice thing and that sorted it out with help from i can now override the themes

once again thanks.

maddragon151

Answer 4

Try the Phone Theme Manager.

http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2012/01/phonethememanager/
http://metronuggets.com/2012/07/07/set-custom-themes-in-windows-phone/

You don't have to add the source to your project if you install it using NuGet (search for "PhoneThemeManager").

It works well on WP8 to set light/dark theme and accent color. I have not tried a full custom theme, which is said to be supported.

---

Richard Woo

Hi Richard, 

It seems to be working in general but when I try to override white theme with dark, the applicationbar seems to get the white background for a second before it switches to dark. This gives the very poor theme switching experience. Did you or anyone notice it or found a solution to it?

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MCTS BTS 2006/ASP.net 2.0

Answer 5

Suneet, try setting Opacity="0.99" in the ApplicationBar. It will make the ApplicationBar semi-transparent (although with value 0.99 it looks opaque). The property actually refers to the ApplicationBar's background opacity. The content of your page will extend behind the ApplicationBar, and should prevent flashing by the default background of light theme. The caveat is that you may need to adjust the layout of the page to account for the extra height of the content area.

---

Richard Woo