LightSwitch Themes – One of the most pivotal moments for me during my LightSwitch adventures were themes. If you have been following the previous articles, you will know that LightSwitch brings exceptional ease of use to your development repertoire.
One of the most confining areas of an application is the look and feel. Once you have created an app, it becomes extremely difficult to change the look and feel without being an extremely painful experience. With LightSwitch Themes, this is no longer a problem. The process to follow to change a LightSwitch Theme isn’t immediately obvious. But this doesn’t make the process any more difficult to perform.
LightSwitch Themes – Change With Ease
Changing LightSwitch Themes is probably one of the easiest things to do.
In Visual Studio 2012, access the Extensions and Updates menu from the Tools menu. (Note that you can also download a theme and install it by clicking on the vsix file.)
Searching for the LightSwitch Metro Theme will allow you to download and install it quite easily after accepting the license agreement.
Head on over to the Project menu and select the project’s properties.
Under the Extensions tab, check the ‘LightSwitch Metro Theme’ and any other themes you want to enable.
Change the tab to the General Properties tab and select the theme you want to enable from the Theme drop down. Click on the save button and then run your application.
You will see the selected LightSwitch Theme immediately applied to your application.
Applying another theme (In the example above, the VS Dark Blue Theme) will once again change your application easily without you doing any of the heavy lifting. LightSwitch Themes are incredibly easy to change and apply to your application.