How to detect the 'Theme Background' being used in WP7

This article explains how to determine whether the dark or light Windows Phone theme is visible.

See Also

• Determining Theme Background and Accent Color (MSDN)
• Themes for Windows Phone (MSDN)
• Theme aware Windows Phone application (wiki)

Article Metadata

---

Tested with

SDK: Windows Phone SDK 7.1

Devices(s): Nokia Lumia 800

---

Compatibility

Platform(s): Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango)

---

Article

Created: sreerajvr (06 Apr 2012)

Last edited: hamishwillee (30 Nov 2012)

Introduction

Windows Phone 7 has either a dark (black) or light (white) theme. In order to get the best result for your app's colour scheme it can be useful to be able to determine which theme is being used.

The following code snippet shows how you can determine the theme by comparison of the "PhoneForegroundColor" to the value for black ("#FFFFFFFF"). An alternative, as outlined in Determining Theme Background and Accent Color (MSDN) is to get the Visibility of the PhoneDarkThemeVisibility

Source Code

XAML

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent">
       <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,17,0,28">
          <TextBlock x:Name="PageTitle" Text="page name" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
        </StackPanel>
</Grid>

CSharp

 public MainPage()
 {
            InitializeComponent();
            Color themebackground = (Color)Application.Current.Resources["PhoneForegroundColor"];
 
            if (themebackground.ToString() == "#FFFFFFFF")
            {
                this.PageTitle.Text = "Dark ";
            }
            else 
            {
                this.PageTitle.Text = "Light ";
            }  
}

Summary

This code snippet shows how to determine whether the dark or light theme is visible.