Merging Resource Dictionaries for fun and profit
Here are two scenarios where merged ResourceDictionary objects are the way forward.
I’m working on a WPF project that needs to be single instance. Heaven forbid that the WPF team should pollute the purity of their framework with support for this kind of thing (or NotifyIcon support but that’s another story) so I’m using the code recommended by Arik Poznanski: WPF Single Instance Application. I like this because it both enforces a single instance and provides an interface that reports the command line passed to any attempt to launch another instance.
An issue with using this code is that you need to write a Main function and so App.xaml is set to Page instead of Application Definition. Once you’ve done this the program works fine but the Visual Studio designer fails to load resources in UserControls (and in Windows containing those UserControls).
The fix is to factor all of the application level resources out into a separate ResourceDictionary (i.e. MergedResources.xaml). Once you’ve done this merge the new ResourceDictionary into App.xaml as follows:
Next, in each Window or UserControl reference the same ResourceDictionary:
The designer will now be able to find the correct resources for each UserControl and Window.
The second scenario is factoring resources and other Xaml into a DLL. To pull resources in from a referenced assembly you just need to use a Pack Uri when merging in the remote ResourceDictionary:
If you’re putting Windows and UserControls in the DLL use exactly the same approach to reference the resources using ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries and you’ll get designer support for these as well.
Related Posts
- XamlParseException and 256x256 icons
- The Secret Diary of a Xamarin Android Developer, Aged 48 1/3
- WPF commands with nested focus scope
- Use WPF Dispatcher to invoke event handler only when needed
- Reboot computer in C# / .NET
(Published to the Fediverse as: Merging Resource Dictionaries for fun and profit #code #.net #c# #wpf #xaml Get designer support for XAML loaded from a DLL by merging resource dictionaries in .NET WPF. )
Comments
It has to be added where you're using the resource dictionary. So if you've factored resources out into a DLL you'll have to change the project that uses the DLL to reference it. Not sure what you mean by not changing the parent project.
where should the code <resourcedictionary> <resourcedictionary.mergeddictionaries> <resourcedictionary source="/MyDll;component/ExternalResources.xaml"> </resourcedictionary></resourcedictionary.mergeddictionaries></resourcedictionary>
be included I mean in which file ? as we don't want to change anything in the parent project, so where should these lines be written?
Add Comment
All comments are moderated. Your email address is used to display a Gravatar and optionally for notification of new comments and to sign up for the newsletter.