I am using prism framework in a silverlight app with multiple modules in separate XAPs.
I have a resource dictionary defined in my in my shell project. In my modules I can use the resources fine, but since the modules are decoupled from the shell until they are loaded at runtime the designer does not show them or recognize them.
Is there a way to make the modules aware of my resources at design time without merging my resource file in every view xaml?
My resource files are in a “common” project.
I have found there are a couple of solutions to this:
1) When you create a module project, leave the App.xaml in the project instead of deleting it and instantiate your resources in there just as if it were its own application by itself (you can also add a new Application class to the project if you have already deleted it). When your module is loaded into the shell that file will be ignored so it’s essentially only valid during design time. This works well in visual studio and blend although if you have many modules, memory footprint may become a problem.
2) Using design time resources. Some info about setting this up here: http://adamkinney.com/blog/2010/05/04/design-time-resources-in-expression-blend-4-rc/. This offers only blend support and your views will be stripped of all styles and formatting in visual studio. This was not ideal for me because I like working on certain aspects of the UI in visual studio. There also doesn’t seem to be a documented way of manually setting up design time resources.