Question

I am developing some UI components with the new Metro Design (WinRT) in order to provide them to a third party company.
We are having some trouble deploying the package of the controls.
When they reference our .dll files produced by our controls on a new Project, they can access all the objects and instantiate them, but when compiling, an error of the type:

"Payload file '...\bin\Debug\Charts\Line\Line.xaml' does not exist.". (if we provide the /bin .dll)

OR

XamlParseException at Windows.UI.Xaml.Application.LoadComponent(Object component, Uri resourceLocator, ComponentResourceLocation componentResourceLocation) (if we use the .dll from /obj folder)

We know a “workaround for this problem is to deploy/provide the xaml” files as well with the .dll to our customers, but we would really like to avoid showing our XAML code.

Thanks in advance

NG

Answer 1

XAML files are loose files in Windows 8 WinRT/XAML, so you do have to share the XAML files if you want to make use of the built-in tools that bind XAML and code behind together.

You will probably want to read Tim Heuer’s article on building deployable controls here. He mentions two methods to share your controls – either using VS Extensions SDK where they will be installed into Visual Studio or as NuGet packages where you can share a NuGet package. That way the files will not be visible when you first look at the component you share, though they will be included in the project folder, so if someone looks closer – they will see your XAML.

The alternative you seem to want to avoid is to share the dll + xaml files as just files to drop into the project. You would need to put the xaml files into a folder with the same name as the dll (sans the file extension) for them to be found by the tools. Just an alternative to using the tools.

If you look at the apps you install from the store – you can see all the XAML files that come with them. There is no good alternative at this point really other than writing tons of code to somehow embed the XAML into your binary or replace it with code behind.