Supporting dark mode with Win32 controls is never an easy exercise, but if you’ve been following along with our work to modernize our Windows framework with XAML, then you may have already updated your apps with the XAML TabView control that natively supports dark mode.

Simply plug this bit of XAML into our DesktopXAMLContainer Content property and you’ve got yourself a modern looking TabPanel that already supported dark mode even before we did.

<winui:TabView>
	<winui:TabView.TabItems>
		<winui:TabViewItem Header="Tab 1">
			<StackPanel>
				<TextBlock Text="This is Tab 1" Margin="5"/>
				<Button Content="Button 1" Margin="5"/>
				<CheckBox Content="Checkbox 1" IsChecked="True" Margin="5"/>
			</StackPanel>
		</winui:TabViewItem>
		<winui:TabViewItem Header="Tab 2">
			<StackPanel>
				<TextBlock Text="This is Tab 2" Margin="5"/>
				<TextBox Text="Enter text here" Margin="5"/>
				<ComboBox Margin="5">
					<ComboBoxItem Content="Item 1"/>
					<ComboBoxItem Content="Item 2"/>
					<ComboBoxItem Content="Item 3"/>
				</ComboBox>
			</StackPanel>
		</winui:TabViewItem>
	</winui:TabView.TabItems>
</winui:TabView>

While people debate on which mode (light or dark) they prefer to work in, you can ultimately control whether you want to support dark mode or not in your app by toggling the “Supports Dark Mode” build setting. For an example on how to dynamically switch between dark and light mode in your app using XAML, see the XAML ButtonStyling example project and the RequestedTheme property.

William Yu grew up in Canada learning to program BASIC on a Vic-20. He is Xojo’s resident Windows and Linux engineer, among his many other skills. Some may say he has joined the dark side here in the USA, but he will always be a Canadian at heart.

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