Extracting Propreties to Styles (Xaml processing tool) - wpf

Question

I need to extract the props (Height, Width, HorizontalAligment .. etc) of a control to a style.
Do you guys know any tool to do that?
I have tried Xaml Power tools (nice, but only handles xml like attribute properties for ex: is not recognized)
Also looked over expression blend.. didn't find anything there either.
At least some framework/api for easy parsing of xaml (found Xaml Toolkit, but it remained in CTP version in 2010..)
Thanks!

Answer 1

If you have created an element and specified properties such as the Slider control below.
<Window x:Class="Styling.ExtractStyle"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Title="ViewTemplateSource" Height="300" Width="300">
<Window.Resources>
</Window.Resources>
<Grid Name="g1">
<Slider Name="mySlider" Height="100" VerticalAlignment="Center">
<Slider.Width>200</Slider.Width>
</Slider>
</Grid>
</Window>
You can implement an extension to the FrameworkElement class...
public static class FrameworkElementExtensions
{
public static void SaveElementStyleToFile(this FrameworkElement element, string fileName)
{
if (element != null)
{
XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings
{
Indent = true,
IndentChars = new string(' ', 4),
NewLineOnAttributes = true
};
StringBuilder strbuild = new StringBuilder();
XmlWriter xmlwrite = XmlWriter.Create(strbuild, settings);
if (xmlwrite != null)
{
XamlWriter.Save(element, xmlwrite);
}
File.WriteAllText(fileName, strbuild.ToString());
}
else
{
throw new Exception("Cannot serialize a null object");
}
}
}
And call the extension method...
mySlider.SaveElementStyleToFile("mySliderStyle.xaml");
This will give you an XML file in the root directory of your application which captures the 'hard-coded' properties. Here's what it outputs...
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<Slider
Name="mySlider"
Width="200"
Height="100"
VerticalAlignment="Center"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" />
You can then morph this file into a persistent style with an editor. Note that the target Framework element must be first run through WPF's two pass layout system for this technique to work.
For example
TextBox t = new TextBox();
t.Height = 20;
t.SaveElementStyleToFile("myfile.xml");
will NOT work for that reason. Short of the conveniences offered by Xaml Power Toys and/or a full Xaml parser, this is likely to be as close as you will get to meeting your requirements...