In my ongoing effort to mock the Office 2007 UI, I wrote this XAML gradient generator:
This tool changes the brightness and saturation of a given color, so, for best results, try to choose a color that isn’t maxed out (255) in either brightness or saturation.
I had just finished a WPF project with some custom controls that mesh well with the default Win7/Vista theme only to find that switching to classic mode made my application look terrible.
Uhh no…
Since our users are running Windows XP in classic mode, this clearly needed to be fixed. Luckily, we can force WPF to use Aero theming in classic mode with just a little bit of code.
Adding a focus indicator to your controls can help make your application more user friendly and can provide a bit of visual polish for your projects. Ultimately, we are trying to mimic the following look in WPF:
