Along with Accent Color and Cosmopolitan

May 19, 2010 10:44 GMT  ·  By

New application themes are now available for download from Microsoft for developers leveraging the latest iteration of Silverlight. A total of three new Silverlight 4 Application Themes went live on the Microsoft Download Center earlier this week, namely the Accent Color, Windows 7 and Cosmopolitan themes. As it was the case with previous releases of application themes for Silverlight, the latest releases can be grabbed free of charge. Developers will be able to take advantage of the new themes in concert with the navigation template that is included in the Silverlight 4 Tools installer. At the same time, devs can turn to a number of resource dictionaries that are provided alongside the themes.

“We are making available the final version of the 3 new application themes we developed. These include the Accent Color, Windows 7 and Cosmopolitan themes. The download contains Visual Studio 2010 template installers, Blend 4 compatible templates as well as the raw resource dictionary assets and sample projects. Final versions for the RIA Services business application template will be coming as we identified some last minute changes we need to make. You can, of course, use the raw assets and tweak them into your existing applications as needed,” Tim Heuer, program manager for Microsoft Silverlight, revealed.

Developers that have explored the new possibilities offered by Silverlight already know that they can extensively customize the look and feel of controls for applications through themes. In the particular case of the latest Silverlight 4 themes, ‘Cosmopolitan’ is based on the Metro UI. However, the Cosmopolitan label has nothing to do with the actual moniker for the Windows Phone 7 design language, codename Metro.

“To install the themes into Visual Studio 2010, double-click on the *.vsix files in the VS2010 folder. To install the themes for use in Blend 4, copy the folders in the Blend4 folder to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\ProjectTemplates\en\CSharp\Silverlight. The raw assets (resource dictionaries) are available in the SL4Themes-RawAssets.zip file for using in existing projects or to extract theme elements for use elsewhere in your applications,” Microsoft noted.

Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RTM are available for download here.

Silverlight 4 Build 4.0.50401.0 RTW is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download
here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download
here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download
here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download
here.

.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.