component appearance with Style=tsOffice2016Black

Recently, a "dark mode" UI is getting more and more asked for. Long available in MS Office, now a Win10 update brought a dark themed Windows Explorer interface. My software allows UI changes, closely following the scheme explained here: https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/atbdev3.asp

To have a really dark themed UI, the "Office 2016 Black" style seems best suited. However, this creates huge problems, as many components will not follow the needed color changes. All text fonts should be white or light grey on the dark grey to black backgrounds, but they mostly aren't. It works well for TAdvToolbarPager, TAdvOfficePager, all around TPolyList, for TadvPopuMenu and TAdvOfficeRadioGroup.
It does not work for TAdvGlowButton (!), TAdvOfficeCheckBox, TAdvEdit, TAdvSpinEdit, ... Here the  font color stays black which makes them unreadable on the dark style theme.
Here is a demo project showing the problem: http://www.effemm2.de/div/styler_test.zip

Hopefully I was dumb and missing something simple. Read all guidances up and down and searched through forum, and tried "everything", to no avail...

not to forget: using Win7 Pro 64bit, Delphi XE5 and TMS Component Pack 9.0.5.2

finally, a screenshot explaining the problem:


(and here is the demo project as clickable link: http:///www.effemm2.de/div/styler_test.zip)

We have fixed the issue with TAdvGlowButton text color on Office2016 black. The next update will address this.

TAdvEdit, TAdvSpinEdit are not Office styled components, these do not automatically adopt the Office style font color. You'd need to change these font colors programmatically.
Oh well... But thanks so far...
By the way: the frame of tadvofficeradiogroup isn't drawn in white colour in the opened forms, in contrary to the main window. Not sure where this comes from...
Further:
- Shouldn't a child form's background colour turn to some kind of dark grey or black with tsOffice2016Black when a FormStyler is present? It even seems to prevent manual setting form color on Form creation:-(
- Shouldn't dropdown controls like TAdvOfficeComboBox, TAdvOfficeFontSelector, TAdvOfficeFontSizeSelector, TAdvOfficeColorSelector, TAdvOfficeSelector, ... have white text on some kind of dark grey background?

You're correct about this.
We have adapted this. This improvement will be included in the next update.

Any idea when this version will be released? Website says Tuesday, April 23, 2019 as estimated date...

Thanks,
Friedrich

We aim for next week.

Tried the v9.1.0.0 update of VCL Components, and it went awfully wrong:-(
(Yes, I uninstalled the previous verison before and cared for everything, as I do for every update since three years).
Somehow, there is now a problem with the TTMSFrame, used by default in TMS-generated Office ribbon applications. On loading project and when switching to forms containing frames, an access violation in in module TMSDXE5.bpl occurs. This is even the case for the simple demo application linked in my earlier post above (http://www.effemm2.de/div/styler_test.zip). In my real application this leads to the complete File menu with PolyList won't show any more at run time. Which is inacceptable.
I wasn't able to fix this, so I reverted to v9.0.7 Since then, at run-time all AdvTrackBar components are located in places far away from their design-time locations. Not nice...

I downloaded and tested your application here but I don't see any error with this here




so, it is not clear to me how you have a different behavior. Do you perform any specific actions in the app to get the error? I changed the office style here to Office 2016 black.

Bruno Fierens2019-05-06 12:27:27
It happens at design time in the IDE: when switching from code view to form view with F12, there is the access violation in in module TMSDXE5.bpl .In my real application, the same happens. Additionally, showing the File menu fram from the AdvShapeButton is defunct. I went back and forth three times between the new and older component package and the behaviour is reproducible. Perhaps something goes wrong during installation / bpl compilation? I dind't yet try manual installation, out of fear to do something wrong and make it worse.

Apart from this: in the screenshot above you see: Shouldn't the AdvGlowButton have white text colour, as well as the AdvOfficeRadioGroup text in the child window?

Did the installation again, this time manually, and get the same error upon loading the example project above: http://www.effemm2.de/div/screenshot_accessviolation_TMS.png

Ha! Now I found a reproducible way to get this error:
- create a simple, fresh TMS Office 2016 ribbon application
- add one AdvOfficeComboBox to the AdvToolbarPager
and it goes haywire immediately! At least on my system...

Thanks for these details. We could indeed identify an issue with TAdvOfficeComboBox. 
We internally fixed this meanwhile and we'll release update v9.1.0.1 as soon as possible.

is it perhaps possible to obtain a preview version or a description of the fix, so that I can go on with development?

You can contact us by email for getting an immediate incremental source update.

OK, great!Just sent an email to help@tmssoftware.com , referring to this thread. Hope that will work...