Guidelines for Designing Stylable Controls

Guidelines for Designing Stylable Controls: "Guidelines for Designing Stylable Controls

This document summarizes a set of best practices to consider when designing a control which you intend to be easily stylable and templatable. We came to this set of best practices through a lot of trial and error while working on the theme control styles for the built-in WPF control set. We learned that successful styling is as much a function of a well-designed object model as it is of the style itself. The intended audience for this document is the control author, not the style author.

This topic contains the following sections.

* Terminology
* Before You Start: Understanding Your Control
* General Guidelines
* Theme Considerations
* Related Topics

Terminology

'Styling and templating' refer to the suite of technologies that enable a control author to defer the visual aspects of the control to the style and template of the control. This suite of technologies includes:

*

Styles (including property setters, triggers, and storyboards)
*

Resources
*

Control Templates
*

Data Templates

For an introduction of styling and templating, see the Styling and Templating topic.
Before You Start: U"