You need to use a Theme.AppCompat theme (or descendant) with this activity

Android Studio 0.4.5

Android documentation for creating custom dialog boxes: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/dialogs.html

If you want a custom dialog, you can instead display an Activity as a dialog instead of using the Dialog APIs. Simply create an activity and set its theme to Theme.Holo.Dialog in the <activity> manifest element:

<activity android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Holo.Dialog" >

However, when I tried this I get the following exception:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: You need to use a Theme.AppCompat theme (or descendant) with this activity

I am supporting the following, and I can't using something greater than 10 for the min:

minSdkVersion 10
targetSdkVersion 19

In my styles I have the following:

<!-- Base application theme. -->
    <style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">

And in my manifest I have this for the activity:

 <application
        android:allowBackup="true"
        android:icon="@drawable/ic_launcher"
        android:label="@string/app_name"
        android:theme="@style/AppTheme" >
        <activity
            android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Holo.Light.Dialog"
            android:name="com.ssd.register.Dialog_update"
            android:label="@string/title_activity_dialog_update" >
        </activity>

Creating the dialog box like this was something I was hopping to do, as I have already completed the layout.

Can anyone tell me how I can get around this problem?

The reason you are having this problem is because the activity you are trying to apply the dialog theme to is extending ActionBarActivity which requires the AppCompat theme to be applied.

Update: Extending AppCompatActivity would also have this problem

In this case, change the Java inheritance from ActionBarActivity to Activity and leave the dialog theme in the manifest as it is, a non Theme.AppCompat value

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The general rule is that if you want your code to support older versions of Android, it should have the AppCompat theme and the java code should extend AppCompatActivity. If you have *an activity that doesn't need this support, such as you only care about the latest versions and features of Android, you can apply any theme to it but the java code must extend plain old Activity.

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NOTE: When change from AppCompatActivity (or a subclass, ActionBarActivity), to Activity, must also change the various calls with "support" to the corresponding call without "support". So, instead of getSupportFragmentManager, call getFragmentManager.