One key experience I gained from the work on DockPanel Suite is that embracing some VS built-in mechanism can speed up custom theme development.
For example, a new theme (like VS2015) already comes in two parts,
- The color schemes (light, dark, blue, etc.) which you can get easily from the Color Theme Manager extension of Visual Studio for Windows. The
.vstheme file exported there might contain far more colors than what are needed in DockPanel Suite/AvalonDock. However, it really gives you an easy way to know what the colors used by VS are, and you can create variants from them.
- The slight visual changes Microsoft introduced in major VS releases, either tab shapes or certain drawing details.
Right now AvalonDock captures both nicely in its theme system, but the color schemes remain handcrafted in XAML files. I think if you want to quickly expand the supported/built-in themes in AvalonDock as its new maintainer, it might be worth the while considering adding .vstheme support.
DockPanel Suite contains all necessary references to use this file format.
One key experience I gained from the work on DockPanel Suite is that embracing some VS built-in mechanism can speed up custom theme development.
For example, a new theme (like VS2015) already comes in two parts,
.vsthemefile exported there might contain far more colors than what are needed in DockPanel Suite/AvalonDock. However, it really gives you an easy way to know what the colors used by VS are, and you can create variants from them.Right now AvalonDock captures both nicely in its theme system, but the color schemes remain handcrafted in XAML files. I think if you want to quickly expand the supported/built-in themes in AvalonDock as its new maintainer, it might be worth the while considering adding .vstheme support.
DockPanel Suite contains all necessary references to use this file format.