A common place to put styles in Silverlight applications is the App.xaml file. Any style declared in App.xaml is automatically picked up by any of your custom controls in your application. However, if you create a Silverlight Class Library you will notice there is no App.xaml file to put styles in.
In order to create styles in a Silverlight Class Library there are primarily two steps you can take in order for your controls to pick up on the statically declared styles.
Step #1. Add a Silverlight Resource Dictionary
Using Visual Studio, from your class library project in the solution explorer, right click and choose “Add New Item”. From there, choose “Silverlight Resource Dictionary” as seen in the screenshot below giving it any name you want.
Step #2: In your controls, add a reference to the resource you just added.
<UserControl.Resources>
<ResourceDictionary>
<ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
<ResourceDictionary Source="StyleDictionary.xaml"/>
</ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
</ResourceDictionary>
</UserControl.Resources>
At this point, you can now reference any style you have declared in this resource dictionary from your controls.
Example:
<Button Style="{StaticResource GlossyButton}" Content="Hi" Grid.Row="3"/>
Download source: Tip of the Day #1 Source
Thank you,
–Mike
Hi Mike,
Is this is Same as generic.xaml or Different.
I tried putting the style in generic.xaml but my XAML will not pick up on styles declared in the file. The only way I could get them to be recognized is if I added the resouce dictionary as described in this blog.
If anyone knows of any tricks to get things working in generic.xaml please let me know.