WPF 4.5 Unleashed

Skins

Skinning refers to the act of changing an application’s appearance (or skin) on the fly, typically by third parties. WPF doesn’t have a distinct concept called a skin, nor does it have a formal notion of skinning, but it doesn’t need one. You can easily write an application or a component that supports dynamic skinning by using WPF’s dynamic resource mechanism (described in Chapter 12, “Resources”) combined with Styles and/or templates.

To support skinning in an application, one of the first things you need to do is decide on a data format. Whereas it might make sense to invent a format for Win32 or Windows Forms applications, XAML is a no-brainer data format for skins in WPF applications if you are okay with loading arbitrary code into ...