I previously posted a question on sharing resources across assemblies using Themes/generic.xaml and the ComponentResourceKey markup extension. The solution works nicely, but it requres all of the shared resources to be located in the generic.xaml resource dictionary. Mine is getting rather large, so I thought I would use merged dictionaries in generic.xaml to organize things.
I have had no luck so far. I ran some tests using the demo from my previous post, and as soon as I move resources to a merged dictionary, the ComponentResourceKey fails, complaining that it can't find the source file for the merged dictionary.
Has anyone else gotten this working? How? Thanks for your help.
You could use WPF Resource Dictionary in a separate assembly
Related
I'm trying to create a project dll file that holds core styles, resources, controls, etc. This will then be referenced into various other projects to use as a graphic base to unify the appearance.
Anyway, I have the graphics project set up and I can use it in other projects and it all seems to display correctly. However, XAML intellisense for my static resources doesn't seem to be working.
Here is my resource dictionary reference:
<ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/BIT.GraphicElements;component/BITCoreStyles.xaml" />
As you can see I'm using pack notation to reference it inside it's assembly. I can style elements like I would expect (StButtonAction is in the above dictionary):
Style="{StaticResource StButtonAction}"
However, I have to type it in manually. Intellisense doesn't give it as an option but if I type it manually is applies it successfully. It also works if I add the project to the solution and reference it there, however this is intended to be used by those that don't necessarily have access to the graphics project so that's not a good solution in the long run...
What am I missing? Is there a way to make Intellisense work for these?
Maybe this'll help future searchers even if it doesn't fix your specific problem.
When you have a solution involves external dll then you can occasionally find resources just don't get loaded at design time. At all. Even though you merge in app.xaml the things don't turn up until you run.
It looks like some sort of subtle bug to me.
The way I work round this is to use functionality originally intended for Blend. We are now using the blend designer in visual studio.
In solution explorer, add a resource dictionary to Properties. Yes. Properties. Create it first in your project and drag it up there. This must be called DesignTimeResources. This can then merge any resource dictionaries you will want to use just for design time or when you have an issue makes you think resource dictionaries aren't getting loaded for design time.
Mine is in army editor but uses resources from a referenced dll, UILIb. It looks like:
<ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:local="clr-namespace:ArmyEditor">
<ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
<ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/UILib;component/Resources/UILibResources.xaml"/>
</ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
</ResourceDictionary>
This is a resource dictionary in a bit of an odd place but nothing particularly weird so far.
Next is the bit that many developers will never have done - editing your csproj.
Right click your project and choose unload.
Right click it again and edit it.
In there you will have entries for all the stuff makes up your project. And of course breaking this would be bad so maybe you want to back up first.
If you don't use blend then I think the important thing here is to add a node which says ContainsDesignTimeResources True, but here's mine:
<Page Include="Properties\DesignTimeResources.xaml" Condition="'$(DesignTime)'=='true' OR ('$(SolutionPath)'!='' AND Exists('$(SolutionPath)') AND '$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)'!='true' AND '$(BuildingInsideExpressionBlend)'!='true')">
<Generator>MSBuild:Compile</Generator>
<SubType>Designer</SubType>
<ContainsDesignTimeResources>true</ContainsDesignTimeResources>
</Page>
Save your edits.
Reload your project.
When the designer is open, you should find resources from it are loaded. Maybe this will help intellisense find them.
I mentioned this earlier but.. In my experience, such intellisense on resources is often unreliable.
This definitely solved a similar issue I have had in this solution. It is also useful when you want to temporarily overlay resource dictionaries for localisation/branding testing.
I have this WPF class library with several (local) images marked as Resource. They are located in a subfolder named Resources. To reference them, I use the following markup:
Icon="/AssemblyName;component/Resources/Logo64x64.ico"
And everything works fine in this assembly.
My problem is that I want to use that xaml file in several assemblies with different names. That is, AssemblyName is subject to change from build to build. Is there a way to reference the resource images without dependency on AssemblyName? Or can I use something that dynamically refers to assembly name in the markup? Something like:
Icon="/%AssemblyName%;component/Resources/Logo64x64.ico"
Or do I have to update the AssemblyName every time? Is it a good idea to define properties in the backing C# code and then use binding? I have been avoiding this because it looked like a lot of code to me for referencing each image.
As far as I know, you cannot use pack URI's in class libraries, right? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
I don't know how I missed this, but it turns out I can totally avoid using AssemblyName, since the resources are local and they can be referenced relatively. In my case, the xaml file is in another subfolder, so the resource should be referenced as:
Icon="../Resources/Logo64x64.ico"
My situation is this.
I have multiple projects under a WPF solution which make up a multi-tier application I am developing. Since separate projects will sometimes need to access the same image or xaml resource I'd like to centralize "Public" resources to one project that can be referenced by any other projects requiring these "Public" resources. For example, I have a BMP image that I use in various controls and windows in separate projects that serves as a banner/logo. It seems like I should be able to add this image as a resource to the public resources project and reference it from my other projects instead of adding the image separately to every project that needs it. If this is possible, what would it look like and how should I go about doing it? If my idea just sucks I'm open to suggestions, but the project is going to be quite large so I don't want to be adding resources all over the place.
Thanks!
P.S.
I have searched this topic quite a bit but there are so many garbage answers out there from people that don't know what they are doing. Given that I'm relatively new to WPF I'd rather get a direct answer to my problem.
Well after some tinkering and research I found a solution to my own question. It seems like bits and pieces of my answer were scattered all over the web so I'll try to explain the whole thing at once, in one place. To re-cap I basically wanted to centralize any resources used across projects within my solution. These are the steps I eventually followed to accomplish this.
1.
Create a User Control project in your solution (any project that can host Resource Dictionaries will do). I'll refer to this project as "the resource project".
2.
Add any resource files (images etc...) that you want to share between projects to the resource project. I try to organize files in sub-directories that make sense. You will want to set the build action to "Resource" so that it gets compiled into the output binary.
3.
Now add a resource dictionary to the resource project. In my case I wanted to reference several images so I made one called "ImageDictionary.xaml".
4.
Add references to the image files in the resource dictionary. I am referencing images here but its just a resource dictionary, you can put whatever in there. The string in the middle is just the relative path to the image file you are referring to.
<ImageSource x:Key="SomeImageKey">
Images/SomeImage.bmp
</ImageSource>
5.
Now go to a project that requires the resource dictionary you just made in step 4. It can be another user control or a window, whatever. Right-click on project references and add a reference to the resource project.
6.
Okay now the current project needs to reference the dictionary you made in step 4 that is defined in the resource project. I made a user control first so this is what my code would look like below... Note that I used merged dictionaries. I plan on using more later so I chose this way instead of a single dictionary.
"ResourceProject" below is the name of the project/assembly that you added the resource to.
"component" is a keyword that needs to be there, followed by the path to the dictionary xaml code file.
<UserControl.Resources>
<ResourceDictionary>
<ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
<ResourceDictionary Source="/ResourceProjectAssembly;component/Resources/ImageDictionary.xaml" />
</ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
</ResourceDictionary>
</UserControl.Resources>
As you can see, referencing an external resource dictionary requires something called a "Pack URI". I found a short hand way of doing it. The long way is quite a bit uglier and as far as I know, there is no advantage to it. But here is what the long way looks like.
<UserControl.Resources>
<ResourceDictionary>
<ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
<ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/ResourceProjectAssembly;component/Resources/ImageDictionary.xaml" />
</ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
</ResourceDictionary>
</UserControl.Resources>
7.
Now that your current project has a reference to the resource dictionary in the resource project, you can use anything from that dictionary. I went ahead and put an image in my user control. Below is the code. Its just like referencing a dictionary locally.
<Image Source="{StaticResource SomeImageKey}" />
8.
Important Note!
This caused me a headache for a while before I found it. Make sure that the startup project in your solution has a reference to the resource project EVEN IF THE STARTUP PROJECT DOES NOT USE THE RESOURCE PROJECT. (I.e. right-click references, add reference etc...)
The resources will not get compiled into the output unless you do this. This part was tricky because the designer was even showing my images and I had no xaml errors but at runtime it would throw set property and cannot find file exceptions. This went away when I referenced my resource project from my startup project.
Hopefully this helps somebody.
Below are some links to a few places (including stackoverflow) that gave me what I needed to put all the pieces together.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wpfsldesigner/archive/2010/06/03/creating-and-consuming-resource-dictionaries-in-wpf-and-silverlight.aspx
Load WPF styles or other Static Resources from an external file or assembly
ResourceDictionary in a separate assembly
I have a big solution with many projects. Most of controls connect several resource dictionaries using MergedDictionaries. Is there any way to find out which resource dictionaries are not used any more and could be easily removed from merged dictionaries.
I'm aware about SharedResourceDictionary approach, but I can't use that right away. So, that's not an option for now.
I am trying to merge all the assemblies of an class library in a single .dll file.
I can merge all the assemblies using the Ilmerge but is that when I use the merged dll in a Silverlight application I am having trouble when a template is apply to my control and binding problems if I use a control that inherits with UserControl.
is there any solution to solve this problem?
The problem is that when the initial dlls are built the Xaml in the project is added as a resource in the dll. The code generated to load this xaml will look something like this:-
System.Windows.Application.LoadComponent(this, new System.Uri("/SilverlightLibrary1;component/MyControl.xaml", System.UriKind.Relative));
Note how the name of the dll forms part of the Uri need to fetch the xaml. I doubt IlMerge is able to spot that and fix it up. Hence once merged the Uris cannot be found.
A resolution for this is probably uglier than multiple references or simply creating another project that links all the code files involved.