Styling Overview
This section is intended to give you a broad understanding of the possible ways by which you can change the visual appearance of RadGridView and its elements. There is also comprehensive information about their ControlTemplates. You will need this information if you want to customize their appearance.
To learn how to style Telerik UI for WPF read the common topics about Setting a Theme (Using Implicit Styles). You can also check the Editing Control Templates topic.
You can modify the look of the RadGridView and its elements either by changing some of the resources exposed by the API, or by modifying their ControlTemplates. In the control template you are allowed to reorder the template parts and add your own elements. However, when changing the control template you should be careful to include all required parts.
Using Implicit Styles gives you the ability to easily extract and edit the default ControlTemplates of the controls. You can follow this article for two different approaches on how to extract the ControlTemplates.
Note that when changing the ControlTemplate you should include all required parts. Even if your code compiles, some of the functionality may be impacted due to the omission of the required parts. The required parts are usually marked with the prefix "PART_".
To learn more about styling the RadGridView specific elements, read the following topics.
As of 2013 Q2 SP we have introduced Lightweight Templates for RadGridView and RadTreeListView. The main idea is to limit the number of visual elements within the templates in order to speed up the performance of the control. Read more