A guide for styles, themes, colors and skins

I think that your XTToolkit is by far the best tool I use during development. My colleagues can't believe how I can make applications so fast and so good looking. They all use .NET C#, but this XTToolkit just makes the bridge between fast and reliable C++ code and a stunning user experience.

However, even I can  make good looking application I'm sure that I can do it even better if I fully understand how to control styles, themes, colors and skins.

Lets assume that I want to make an application using the Office 2007 Black Theme. Then I load the Office2007.dll with the Black Theme ini-file. This gives me a nice black ribbon with orange hover effects. The control bars also gets an orange active title bar, but the orange gradient is not the same as for the ribbon? A report control in a command bar window is not themes a all. It still shows blue highlighted selections and the old yellow tooltips. The MDI child windows are not themed either, they still have standard blue title bars, but I can use the Office 2007 hook class and then they become themed. When opening dialogs I still get the standard blue dialogs, ok now I think I probably need to skin the application. With the black skin the dialogs bets a black caption bar. but it does not look like the (same black) as the caption in the ribbon. And when the application is not-maximized the ribbon caption bar fades from black to blue.

What I want to say is that I’m struggling finding out when and where to set the different styles, themes etc. Some links to other topics:

I would love my application to look consistent, same colors, gradients selection etc. Could you please advice me and probably also other how to achieve this, because I’m sure XTToolkit can accomplice this.

-cpede