Silverlight™ 3 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 8. Styling Your App and Dealing with Resources

Creating beautiful, highly styled web-based applications is a core promise of the Silverlight platform. Rarely have we seen Microsoft promote ugly Silverlight apps. Generally, they've been through the user experience and visual design machines of top-notch companies who specialize in creating beautiful software. However, learning to take advantage of the power of the platform and thus deliver on the promise of the platform starts at a technical, and somewhat unbeautiful, level. I'm not even going to try to teach you to create a thing of great beauty — I'm just going to empower you to apply your artistic talents to a platform that embraces them.

In this chapter, I'll teach you how to customize the look and feel of the core controls you were introduced to in previous chapters. I'll discuss the ways you can target controls for styling, present approaches for organizing your styles and resources, and teach you what a resource actually is. When we're finished, you should have a solid understanding of how to make your app look the way you want it to.

Getting Started

Before we jump into styling, I want to define a small set of core terminology that will be used throughout this chapter. I also want to define a testing environment that you can use to follow the examples that are coming up. Let's get started!

Core Terminology

We'll start with five key concepts that will be used throughout this discussion. There are many more concepts that ...