Smartphone WM5 skinning

Thought I'd pass on some things I discovered when skinning WM5 devices. Apparently there is no way to exactly define the softkey and titlebar gradients in the homescreen xml file. It has a color entry called "COLOR_TRAYGRADLEFT" which has some effect on how the softkeys and titlebar is colored - although not exactly. This had me very confused until I did some extensive searching online and found that Microsoft has decided that skinners shouldn't be allowed to set these colors to what they want. Instead WM5 examines your skin and decides on a basehue value which is put into the registry. I have yet to figure out how to be able to set this to what I want inside the xml file. Any suggestions are welcome :).

Now, you can change this registry value and it will instantly without a soft-reset set the title bar and softkey gradients colors. Some nice people have even made a tool for calculating what you want it to be. Here is the info: XDADevelopers wiki

Especially the downloadable file at the bottom has very useful info :).

If I was making a theme for a pocketpc I could easily change the tsk file to have the theme set this registry setting automatically, but with smartphones there is no way to do that since a homescreen skin is just one xml file and one background image (how can I have the xml file set a registry value? Is this possible?). Also, if you set this registry value and soft-reset your device the basehue value will change (again, calculated from the background image of your theme and the "COLOR_TRAYGRADLEFT" value in the xml file). I would want to know exactly how this calculation is done.

Very confusing and not nice from Microsoft :(.