I’ve found myself looking at hundreds of WPF tutorials over the years and it’s amazing to see how many are badly designed. WPF has an extremely powerful theming (XAML) engine allowing you to create any design your mind creates! I understand a lot of developers are “back end” developers who don’t have design skills but extremely good developers.

I have compiled a list of, what I think to be, very cool out of the box “FREE” themes for WPF to help you out.

First up we have an old time favourite.

Modern UI for WPF (MUI)

A set of controls and styles converting your WPF application into a great looking Modern UI app. This open source project is a spin-off of XAML Spy, the visual runtime inspector for Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows Store and WPF.

LINK: https://github.com/firstfloorsoftware/mui

MahApps.Metro

A toolkit for creating metro-style WPF applications. Lots of goodness out-of-the box.

LINK: https://github.com/MahApps/MahApps.Metro

Material Design In Xaml Toolkit

Google Material Design In XAML & WPF

LINK: https://github.com/ButchersBoy/MaterialDesignInXamlToolkit

Why not combine themes?

You can even combine Both MahApps.Metro and Material Design In Xaml Toolkit and produce something like this :

LINK: https://github.com/RolandPheasant/Dynamic.Trader

Elysium           

Theme is part of project Elysium. It’s a library that implements Metro style for Windows Presentation Foundation applications.

LINK: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/4045f95a-dffa-40aa-8bcf-26b5929ce022

If you have favourites of your own then please send them over!

Update : 17/04/2015 – Added a combined option by https://twitter.com/RolandPheasant