Windows 8 WPF progress bars don't have glow animation

Question

The progress bars in Windows Forms applications have the standard "shine" animation, but when I try to add a progress bar in WPF I don't get such a thing by default. How do we get this back with WPF in Windows 8?

Windows Forms

WPF

Answer 1

It's a rather bizzare fix, but you need to enable Windows Forms styles in your application to use the "gloss." Here's how I did it.

1. Add a reference in your project to System.Windows.Forms
2. Go to the Project settings page and click View Application Events
3. Add a handler to your Application.Startup using the following code (in VB.NET, C# similar) (also, if you need to include the arguments, do so)

Class Application

    ' Application-level events, such as Startup, Exit, and DispatcherUnhandledException
    ' can be handled in this file.

    Private Sub Application_Startup() Handles Me.Startup
        System.Windows.Forms.Application.EnableVisualStyles()
    End Sub

End Class

It seems weird that you would have to call this in order to get the WPF progressbar to work, but the code works for me.