#225 – Using a Brush that Will Update When a System Color Changes

February 22, 2011 Leave a comment

The System.Windows.SystemColors class contains a series of static properties that expose the current predefined system colors.  (Click here to see a list of these system colors).

If you use one of these predefined system colors as a brush using the x:Static markup extension, the color used will be the value of that system color at the time that the application started.  If the system color changes while the application is running, the brush will not change.

You can create and use a dynamic brush, which will change whenever the system color changes, as follows:

	<StackPanel>
		<Ellipse Height="100" Width="200" Fill="{DynamicResource {x:Static SystemColors.HighlightBrushKey}}" Margin="30"/>
	</StackPanel>

Notice that we use the XxxBrushKey property, rather than the XxxBrush property.  Both properties give us a brush, but the XxxBrushKey property gives us a dynamic brush that will change when the system color changes.

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#224 – Using Predefined System Colors in XAML

February 21, 2011 Leave a comment

The System.Windows.SystemColors class contains a series of static properties that expose the current predefined system colors.  (Click here to see a list of these system colors).

You can use the x:Static markup extension in XAML to reference one of the predefined static properties in the SystemColors class.  Here we use a property that represents a predefined SolidColorBrush.

	<StackPanel>
		<Ellipse Height="100" Width="200" Fill="{x:Static SystemColors.HighlightBrush}" Margin="30"/>
	</StackPanel>

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#223 – Predefined System Colors

February 20, 2011 1 Comment

The System.Windows.SystemColors class contains a series of static properties that expose the current predefined system colors.  These are the predefined system colors that you can change from the Control Panel (Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization\Window Color and Appearance in Windows 7).

The properties come in triplets.  For each system color Xxx, there are XxxBrush, XxxBrushKey and XxxColor properties.

Here’s a chart showing the default colors, under the Aero theme in Windows 7.  (Click on the image to see it full-sized).

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