Silverlight needs a quick and easy way for non-professional developers to create style/theme-files to provide styling to Silverlight controls, whether this controls are shipped with Silverlight or are 3rd party ones created by other developers and companies.

We need this for small shops that don’t have designers and also to give developers who also have designer roles, the ability to quick an easy style controls much like many developers today style html controls using the quick and easy CSS style sheets, or perhaps using the more logical  approach that was used for creating theme files for styling asp.net controls.

This might or might not be an easy thing to implement, it all depends on how complex the particular controls looks or how many graphical objects are contained in the actual graphical representation of the control.

Perhaps the styling transformation could be performed by the Silverlight runtime and would happen just before the controls is rendered by overriding or creating look and feel properties that are specified in the particular Silverlight stylesheet/theme file.

The Silverlight “stylesheet/theme-file” could declare the look and feel of a particular control type, by declaring the control type as an XML element and then setting the graphical attributes that make sense to enable styling for that particular control type, at the moment the things that I see useful would be anything that can  apply to XAML tags to override/create the graphical experience such as colors, borders, location, opacity, etc and the ability to specify them using the level of nesting for the XAML that the controls represents or better yet using selectors to select particular element in the control tree like the way templates in XSLT stylesheet use selectors to match specific XML elements.

Currently styling existing Silverlight controls must be done programmatically or specified in the XAML, both approaches have its cons and pros. When using controls is very convenient since the controls have defaults values and the developers just need to worry about the logic behind the UI, however there are scenarios where it would be useful to quickly provide rules for styling controls in a control-by-type basis, which will allow the developer to modify and override the default graphical representation of controls to fit the needs of the project.

This will provide the developer a quick and easy way to standardized controls across Silverlight applications and also defines multiple styles for the Silverlight controls that would be used in different scenarios, any developer would beneficial from this, specially if they are able to do it right in the IDE with out the need to switch to different tool to create the quick and easy design.

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