Control Styles and Templates

Article
02/06/2023

Controls in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) have a ControlTemplate that contains the visual tree of that control. You can change the structure and appearance of a control by modifying the ControlTemplate of that control. There is no way to replace only part of the visual tree of a control; to change the visual tree of a control you must set the Template property of the control to its new and complete ControlTemplate.

The desktop themes determine which resource dictionary is used. The resource dictionaries for the desktop themes are included with your Visual Studio installation. The folder that contains the themes is generally located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\<visual studio edition>\DesignTools\SystemThemes\wpf, where <visual studio edition> represents the edition of Visual Studio.

The following table describes the resource dictionary file names and their corresponding desktop themes.

Theme file	Desktop theme
Classic.xaml	Classic Windows look (from Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000) on the Windows XP operating system..
Luna.NormalColor.xaml	Default blue theme on Windows XP.
Luna.Homestead.xaml	Olive theme on Windows XP.
Luna.Metallic.xaml	Silver theme on Windows XP.
Royale.NormalColor.xaml	Default theme on the Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system.
Aero.NormalColor.xaml	Default theme on the Windows Vista operating system.