Designing app with theme settings - phone 7

Design your windows phone 7 that has the capability to change its appearance based on global theme settings.

Theme settings on windows phone 7 makes it possible to change the look and feel(color,background) of the applications globally. Great feature , all applications will use same accent color and will look alike. Under Theme settings , can found two properties that can be changed, background and accent color. To take the advantage of this values, you must use predefined system resources on your application rather than hard-coding the color values. Lets check how these colors are available on phone 7 wpf application. Inside the world of wpf these are called System brush resources.

Background: light, dark Accent colors: magenta, purple, teal, lime, brown, pink, orange, blue, red, green Here are some System Brush resources PhotoAccentBrush, PhoneBackgroundBrush, PhoneBorderBrush, PhoneForegroundBrush, PhoneChromeBrush, PhoneInactiveBrush, etc. You dont have to remember these values, Blend easily shows you under the Brush resources tab when you are need them. You can also test the different accent colors and backgrounds while designing on Blend 4 for Windows phone. Toggle on Devices window.

You can check your layout on orientation and portrait mode. Change the background and color values to test if your application looks perfect on every combination. See the screen shots below.

devicewindow.png