Theme Upgrade

Oct 02, 2022
3 minutes to read

Note

The WPF Theme Editor does not support the DevExpress WPF Controls 18.2 or later. Use the WPF Theme Designer tool instead.

We here at DevExpress are constantly working on improving the visual appearance of our products. For this purpose, we may modify and/or refactor our themes between major and minor releases. Custom themes created for an earlier version of the DXperience Suite may not be consistent with controls of the latest version due to these changes.

The Theme Editor allows you to upgrade your themes to keep them compatible with latest DXperience versions.

To upgrade a theme, the Theme Editor uses the KDiff3 tool that performs three-way merge upon:

your custom theme of the old version (file ‘B‘);
the original DevExpress theme of the latest version (file ‘C‘);
the original DevExpress theme of the old version (the parent theme stored within your custom theme) (file ‘A‘).

Note

You can upgrade only themes created with Theme Editor v11.2.11 and newer because previous versions of the Theme Editor did not save parental DevExpress themes within user themes.

You cannot upgrade themes created from Color Schemes. Instead, upgrade the base theme and apply a color scheme to it. Do not remove the base theme, because it is necessary for a theme upgrade to a newest version.

To upgrade a theme, follow the steps below.

Open the File menu and select Upgrade Theme.

This invokes the Upgrade Theme dialog.
In this dialog, choose a theme you wish to upgrade and specify an output directory for the upgraded theme. You can use the Browse buttons or specify the required paths manually. In the Target Version combo box, select a version to which you wish to upgrade the theme. Finally, click OK.

This will start the KDiff3 tool.
In the KDiff3 window, open the Directory menu and click Start/Continue Directory Merge.

A confirmation message box appears. Click Do It.

KDiff3 will start merging XAML files.
If a conflict that requires manual resolving occurs, KDiff3 will display ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ XAML files and highlight the conflicting pieces of code.

To resolve the conflict, right-click the <Merge Conflict> tag in the Output section and choose whether to insert code from file ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’.

Open the Directory menu and click Start/Continue Directory Merge to continue merging. This will invoke a message box where you would specify whether or not to save changes. Click Save & Continue.
When merging is completed, a finish message box will be displayed.

Click OK and close the KDiff3 tool, so that the Theme Editor makes final arrangements. Now the upgraded theme is located within the directory you have specified.