Question

I am aware I can reference styles & templates from a resource dictionary and I make significant use of them. But what about complete controls?

I can declare a fully defined WPF control, like a button, within the app.xaml as a resource. For example, the app.xaml file defining a button would contain this:

<Button x:Key="HelpButton" Content="?" />

But how can reference it within the xaml markup of a user control so that the button is rendered?

EDIT:
In response to the question of “Why would you want to?” I agree that a button isn’t an excellent example (it’s just an easy one to describe).

What about a polygon (not a control, I know) that you declare in app.xaml and want to use in multiple xaml files?

Answer 1

You can’t, and to be honest, I’m not sure why you’d want to. That button is one button, meaning that it can only be in one place (at one time); given that, it makes sense to define a new button in every place you need it. As you’ve already discovered, that’s what template resources are for.

(When I say that you can’t, I mean that it’s not supported in plain XAML; it’s conceivable you could implement IValueConverter in a class that returns the button, and bind it in XAML to the content of a content control. And of course, you could use code to add and remove the button programatically from different containers as necessary. Neither seems like a great option.)