We have a designer that did a whole concept of GUI for our next WPF application. If we are able to provide him a "user friendly" way to edit styles, he would have done it by itself.
He only has to edit colors, and small things like Margin, default fonts, ...
Naturally, I tought that Blend would be the solution, but I admit I'm struggling:
- Blend allow us to edit the template, but we don't really want to change the whole template, just some color around. We made a small dummy app that has all the controls required to be themed, we edit template in a dedicated theme file, but I can't find how to have the same template applied to every control(e.g. button) in our application
- We use DevExpress as library, and it appears that most of their component are composed of a lot of subcomponent(for which I cannot just right-click then edit template). Plus it seems that the devExpress theme have the priority over the templates changes(tested by changing background colors by example)
As a pure developer I would create a "style" that would be applied on all controls of a specific type in our application, but I can't see how to create and edit them in blend?
What approach would you take?
You want to use DevExpress Theme Editor. It will allow you to edit all used DevExpress themes in your application. It has a friendly UI which should be usable by your designer.
Another approach is probably not so friendly for your designer but you can also manually override DevExpress themes with your extended ones (require
XAML). I am not sure about the controls but that way you can for sure modify brushes.