How to get Holo Light theme working in my Xamarin application

Question

I'm trying to get my app to use the Holo.Light theme. I've created a custom theme for Holo and put it in

Resourses\values-v11\FsmTheme.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<resources>
    <style name="FsmTheme" parent="@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light">
    </style>
</resources>

I've also created one for older versions and put it in

Resourses\values\FsmTheme.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<resources>
    <style name="FsmTheme" parent="@android:style/Theme.Light.NoTitleBar">
    </style>
</resources>

Then I added it to my AndroidManifest.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:installLocation="auto" android:versionCode="001" android:versionName="001" package="futurestate.app.droid">
    <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="12" android:targetSdkVersion="14" />
    <application android:label="FutureState App Demo" android:icon="@drawable/Icon" Theme="@style/FsmTheme" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />
</manifest>

I'm not sure what else I would need to do to get the theme to take in the app.

Solution 1

The breakdown is on this line.

<application android:label="FutureState App Demo" android:icon="@drawable/Icon" Theme="@style/FsmTheme" />

Some of the tutorials out there show

Theme="@style/ThemeName"

but you should actually structure it the same as the rest of the element

android:theme="@style/ThemeName"

So the final structure will read

<application android:label="FutureState App Demo" android:icon="@drawable/Icon" android:theme="@style/FsmTheme" />

Solution 2

You can use Attributes to modify values in the AndroidManifest.xml, for example this changes the theme to holo light:

[Activity(
    Label = "Foobar",
    MainLauncher = true,
    Theme = "@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light"
)]
public class MainActivity : Activity { ... }

You can also do this at the Application level.

But for your specific problem, it seems that you are naming your style files FsmTheme.xml. That is incorrect. You must name any styling resources styles.xml, so if you rename your files to Resources/values/styles.xml and Resources/values-v11/styles.xml everything should work as expected.

Comments

[csvan]

This ought to be the accepted answer, as it really is the "Xamarin way" of solving the problem.