Silverlight Shared MergedDictionaries

Question

I am using Silverlight 4 and trying to share some common styles (colors, brushes). My take was to put them into a \"Common.xaml\" Resource Dictionary and then use it in all othe

Answer 1

I was able to tweak the solution proposed at http://www.wpftutorial.net/MergedDictionaryPerformance.html to make it work with Silverlight and the VS designer (haven't tried Blend). I have a blog post on it here (http://softnotes.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/shared-resourcedictionary-for-silverlight/)

public class SharedResourceDictionary : ResourceDictionary
{
    public static Dictionary _sharedDictionaries =
       new Dictionary();

    private Uri _sourceUri;
    public new Uri Source
    {
        get { return _sourceUri; }
        set
        {
            _sourceUri = value;
            if (!_sharedDictionaries.ContainsKey(value))
            {
                Application.LoadComponent(this, value);
                _sharedDictionaries.Add(value, this);
            }
            else
            {
                CopyInto(this, _sharedDictionaries[value]);
            }
        }
    }

    private static void CopyInto(ResourceDictionary copy, ResourceDictionary original)
    {
        foreach (var dictionary in original.MergedDictionaries)
        {
            var mergedCopy = new ResourceDictionary();
            CopyInto(mergedCopy, dictionary);
            copy.MergedDictionaries.Add(mergedCopy);
        }
        foreach (DictionaryEntry pair in original)
        {
            copy.Add(pair.Key, pair.Value);
        }
    }
}

XAML usage: