Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Inline Styles

A style in WPF is expressed as zero or more Setter objects inside a Style object. Every element in WPF that derives from either FrameworkElement or FrameworkContentElement has a Style property, which you can set inline using standard XAML property element syntax, as shown in Example 8-4.

Example 8-4. Setting an inline style

<Button ... Name="cell00">
  <Button.Style>
    <Style>
      <Setter Property="Button.FontSize" Value="32pt" />
      <Setter Property="Button.FontWeight" Value="Bold" />
    </Style>
  </Button.Style>
</Button>

Because we want to bundle two property values into our style, we have a Style element with two Setter subelements, one for each property we want to set (i.e., FontSize and FontWeight), both with the Button prefix to indicate the class that contains the property. Properties suitable for styling must be dependency properties.

Due to the extra style syntax and because inline styles can't be shared across elements, inline styles actually involve more typing than just setting the properties. For this reason, inline styles aren't used nearly as often as named styles.^[50]

^{[50] *} However, an inline style is useful if you want to add property and data triggers to an individual element. We discuss triggers later in this chapter.