System brushes

What are they?

If you've poked around the code that's generated by the various "Metro style" C#/XAML or VB/XAML templates in Visual Studio, you've seen mysterious resource references like:

<Setter Property="Background"
    Value="{StaticResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}"/>

ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush isn't declared anywhere in your project; it's actually defined implicitly by the Windows runtime. The same is true of any resource whose name ends in ThemeBrush.

The visual designers in Blend and Visual Studio refer to these as "system brush resources", and they refer to all the various colors that are defined by the Metro "Light" and "Dark" themes. Their meaning changes depending on which theme your app requests.

List of system brushes

If you search the Web for any of these brush names, you won't find any hits on MSDN. Even though these colors feature prominently in the Metro-style templates, Microsoft hasn't yet documented these system brushes in any way (apart from putting a list of their names in the Properties window, but that makes a lousy reference manual).

Below is the documentation Microsoft forgot. This list is complete as of the Release Preview.

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