ASP.NET Themes

Application-Wide Themes for DevExpress ASP.NET AJAX Controls Over ten built-in themes supported throughout the entire DevExpress ASP.NET AJAX Product Line.

All our ASP.NET components support Themes - a feature that allows you to change how a control looks or behaves with just a single mouse click. This is not much of a benefit by itself though. This is a standard feature supported by many ASP.NET components and like other vendors, we didn't have to do much to support it.

Themes may not seem to be a great feature at first glance. Here is what they do. They look for special folders that hold resources and property values for a control. When you choose a particular folder, all those settings take effect. The functionality looks pretty simple, especially when you try the built-in Themes of standard controls. If you try GridView, for instance, you'll see that row colors and fonts change - and that's it.

Obviously, Theme support alone doesn't deliver much value. That's why we go much further than the standard implementation and that of other 3rd party control vendors by delivering the following features that do make a difference:

Unique Themes Designed by DevExpress

DevExpress		Glass		Black Glass
Plastic Blue		Red Wine		Soft Orange
Youthful		Aqua

Microsoft Office Style Themes

Office 2010 Blue		Office 2010 Black		Office 2010 Silver
Office 2003 Blue		Office 2003 Olive		Office 2003 Silver

Supported Throughout the Entire DevExpress ASP.NET Product Line

That's why you can easily build an attractive, visually consistent web site using our components.

Delivered as a Single Separate Assembly

We ship our built-in Themes packed in a single DLL file - ASPxThemes. It contains all theme files, such as skins, CSS and image files, as embedded resources. This gives your site performance benefits: web server traffic is reduced, because shorter resource URLs are used; enabling resource compression and merging options affects files stored in a themes assembly. This also makes it easier to deploy built-in Themes with our components: all you need is to copy the ASPxThemes assembly file, rather than deal with multiple CSS files and images in a hierarchical folder structure.

Add Required Themes to Your Project With Ease

To make our built-in Themes available within your web project, just copy them using ASPxThemeDeployer. This is a stand-alone tool that enables you to visually select the required Themes and automatically copies the selected Themes' files to the specified web project. This tool takes care of most of the heavy lifting of creating an App_Themes folder and its sub-folders for the different themes you selected to import.

Modify Existing or Create Custom Themes

Using the ASPxThemeBuilder tool shipped with the installation, you can easily create custom themes basing them on any desired built-in DevExpress Theme. The Theme Builder allows you to modify the created or previously saved theme by selecting individual controls and their elements, and changing their images, CSS and skin settings in a visual manner.

You can save a modified theme to a desired folder. Moreover, with the Theme Builder, you can even generate a custom assembly for your theme to then be used in your web project. To import a custom theme assembly to a project, use the ASPxThemeDeployer tool.

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