Will Setting a Manifest Solve My WPF Message Box Style Problems?

This is the second post in a series about how to get the latest look and feel for the message boxes and common dialogs in your WPF application, In the first post I described the problem.

I just understood from a reply I got that I wasn’t clear enough about all the little details in the previous post, I hope this will clarify everything a bit:

• This approach works, I know because I tested it myself, it works on XP SP2 and on Vista RTM, I didn’t test it on a 64bit Windows yet but I hope to before publishing the next post in the series.
• This is not the way WinForms does it, WinForms uses a different approach that gets the new style using code and not using a manifest, there are reports that the WinForms way does not work reliably for WPF applications – I did not check those reports myself but since the official recommended way to get the new styles is using a manifest and it’s not more work than the code approach I went the manifest route.
• This doesn’t work when debugging in Visual Studio – it does work when running without debugging (Ctrl-F5) and when running the application directly and not from Visual Studio, I’ll write more about this problem later in this series.
• This will not transform the message box to a WPF control, you will not be able to change the message box using templates or do any other cool WPF tricks – but you will get the system’s visual style instead of the old Windows 2000 style.
• Just setting the manifest will solve the message box style problem but not the file open/save dialogs style problems, the last post in this series will describe how to solve this problem.

I hope everything is clear now, here is the next post in the series with the actual manifest.