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Windows 10 Theme for a Properties Dialog
Today I played around with some code in an WPF application that opens a (COM-style) properties dialog.
When opened outside my application, the dialog looked like this:
But when I opened the dialog from my code, it looked like this:
The solution is simple but appears blog-worthy to me because I had a hard time searching the Web using rather unspecific search terms like “properties dialog”, theme, style, etc.
In the end I came across a theme-related Microsoft article for C++ mentioning a manifest file and connected the dots to a StackOverflow question/answer about changing the Windows User Account Control level for a C#/WPF application using a custom manifest.
What to do
Create the custom manifest file
- In Visual Studio (2019), open the context menu of the project for the WPF application.
- Add > New item.
- Ctrl+E (to jump to the search box), enter “manifest”.
- Press the “Add” button to add the “app.manifest” file to the project.
- Visual Studio selects the file automatically (see project properties > Application > Resources > Icon and manifest > Manifest)
Edit the manifest
- Open the “app.manifest” file.
- Scroll to the bottom.
- Uncomment the section behind the “Enable themes for Windows common controls and dialogs (Windows XP and later)” comment.
- Rebuild.
That’s it!
In case you are wondering about my (webcam) experiment: This will be the topic of an upcoming blog post.