Windows Store App Development Snack: Change App Theme from Dark to Light

you may have seen in visual studio & blend the option to change the windows theme from dark (the default) to light. the problem is that is a runtime it seems to make zero difference and there is no way in windows 8 to change it (like we had with windows phone).

the solution to this is to change it in the app.xaml file – but going to the application node (the very first one) and adding requestedtheme="light" to switch to the light theme or requestedtheme="dark" to switch to the dark theme.

this will have a massive impact on the overall appearance of your application!

a word of warning – you may also see the runtime property for this under app.current.requestedtheme and assume you can change it at runtime, however that will raise a notsupportedexception. what you can do is set it on start-up, so if you want to change it “dynamically” the user will need to restart the app for the change to be applied (microsoft has a sample to show this).

lastly an interesting tidbit from the documentation on this:

this property is ignored if the user is running in high contrast mode.

for more posts in this series, see the series index .