Using HSL colors in WPF

One thing that has always irritated me about WPF is you’re still stuck specifying colors in RGB. HSL just feels so much more natural from a design standpoint. Well, we’re not completely out of luck—we’ve got markup extensions.

So I created my own HslColor and HslBrush extensions which are fairly simple to use:

<Window xmlns:e="clr-namespace:WpfExtensions"
        Background="{e:HslBrush H=300,S=50,L=75,A=80}"/>

Hue is specified in degrees from 0 to 360, while Saturation, Lightness, and Alpha are from 0 to 100. The parameters are all doubles and it converts to scRGB behind the scenes, which means you actually get a much higher color precision than if you had just used the equivalent RGB hex. With Windows 7 having native support for scRGB, this will future-proof your application to make good use of upcoming monitors with Deep Color support.

Posted on March 01, 2009 in .NET Framework, C#, Coding, HSL, WPF, XAML

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