Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Silverlight 4 Application Template Themes by Microsoft

I watched John Papa’s Silverlight TV Ep 42: Apply and Customize the new Silverlight Themes this morning and decided to try it out. I felt that the documentation for getting started was sparse, so I decided to write my own to help the community.
First, what is is and why do I care? The themes are designed to provide a navigation template for a Silverlight Business Application. If you are not a designer then chances are you are not going to make something this pretty. =)
First, you should download the themes here. This pack includes the following themes :
Cosmopolitan
Windows 7
Accent Color

Note: The Jet Pack is not available yet but should be available soon.
After you download the theme pack and extract it you will get 2 folders, one for Expression Blend 4 and another for Visual Studio 2010. I had no problem installing the VS2010 by double clicking on the .VSIX file. The Visual Studio 2010 was straight-forward, so I will focus on Blend 4.  The README_First.txt document says that you will need to copy the themes for Blend 4 into the %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\ProjectTemplates\en\CSharp\Silverlight folder. This is only correct for X86 installs of Expression Blend 4. For other X64 versions of Blend 4 you will need to copy the files into the \Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\ProjectTemplates\en\CSharp\Silverlight folder.
Read more: Michael Crump