Get the Windows 10 or 8 accent color in WPF

Windows Accent Color

Since Windows 8 users can choose a system accent color. The color can be seen on the window borders of the default apps and it can be pretty easy be used inside a UWP App.

How to get the accent color in WPF?

Option 1: SystemParameters.WindowGlassBrush - not 100% the same color

As far as I know there are several ways to get the color code, one easy but not 100% correct way is to use the SystemParameters.WindowGlassBrush property that was introduced in .NET 4.5.

Sadly, the color is not 100% correct - I have no idea where this “similar”, but not identical color is used and why the API is returning this color.

It seems this is just a wrapper around the undocumented DwmGetColorizationParameters Win32 API.

Option 2: GetImmersiveColorFromColorSetEx

I found this solution here, which is just a wrapper around the GetImmersiveColorFromColorSetEx Win32 API.

Option 3: Registry, DwmGetColorizationParameters

The last option would be to read the Registry values - I found some hints on this site, but I wouldn’t recommend it, because it is more or less undocumented and might break in the future. So we will use option 1 or 2.

Usage:

The usage of both options is pretty easy (at least with the option 2 code provided) :

    // https://gist.github.com/paulcbetts/3c6aedc9f0cd39a77c37
    var accentColor = new SolidColorBrush(AccentColorSet.ActiveSet["SystemAccent"]);
    this.Code.Background = accentColor;
    this.Code.Text = "AccentColorSet Immersive 'SystemAccent' " + accentColor.Color.ToString();

    // Available in .NET 4.5
    this.SystemProperties.Background = SystemParameters.WindowGlassBrush;
    this.SystemProperties.Text = "SystemParameters.WindowGlassBrush " + ((SolidColorBrush)SystemParameters.WindowGlassBrush).Color.ToString();

Result:

~~As you can see, the lower color does match the border color instead of the first option. Crazy, right?~~ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

From the comments: As Yves Goergen pointed out, the resulting color does not exactly match the border color, but it does match the system accent color, which is ok. I would guess that the border has some chrome behavior attached so that the color is slightly different.

The full code is on GitHub

Hope this helps.