Question

I’m currently using a library that implements Menus and ContextMenus for Silverlight 3 and 4. This library defines a MenuItem class in the System.Windows.Controls namespace.

No problems with SL3 because there is no MenuItem class elsewhere in the Silverlight class library; but now I need to use another control in a Silverlight 4 Toolkit assembly and the toolkit now defines a System.Windows.Controls.MenuItem in this same assembly !

So I need a way to indicate to the compiler that I want to use the System.Windows.Controls.MenuItem from my old assembly and not the one in the toolkit 4 assembly.

The solution seems the “external aliases” features.

I can tweak the files I write myself with external aliases but how to indicate to the code generator, the one that generates “.g.i.cs” files from XAML, wich assembly, more exactly which aliases, to use ?

By default it always generates System.Windows.Controls.MenuItem variables in the “.g.i.cs” files, and of course without aliases the C# compiler is unable to know which assembly to use.

I’m using VS 2010 Professional but I haven’t been able to find an option to change this behaviour.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Finally I’ve found a workaround :
I’ve created a library project that wraps the types from the menus library.

For instance :

namespace Alias
{
    public class MenuItem : System.Windows.Controls.MenuItem
    {
    }
}

I then reference this project from my real project and can use the type through their “new” namespace “Alias”.

It’s a kind of “heavy alias” but seems to work.