Comments on: MergeDefaultStyles build task improves control development (w/source)

By: James Chaldecott

James Chaldecott — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:50:10 +0000

I think there’s a bug in DefaultStyle .GetAttribute(XElement element, params string[] attributes).

I think the test:
if (name != null)
{
return value;
}

Should be:
if (value != null)
{
return value;
}

‘name’ is the loop variable and is never null.

By: Jugdesh D. Vaghella

Jugdesh D. Vaghella — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:30:31 +0000

Dear Jeff,

I have done all my settings as stated for MSBuild Project and done with that, but stuck continuesly at adding tast to my custom controls project.

However, if it will work as per above it solve lots of heavy work of maintaining the generic.xaml.

Pl. simplify further the final section of adding the DLL task to control project.

Thanks in advance.

By: Silverlight Toolkit and Developing Silverlight Controls : : JasonJackson.com

Silverlight Toolkit and Developing Silverlight Controls : : JasonJackson.com — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:46:26 +0000

[...] The Silverlight Toolkit team has done some interesting work setting up their project. Instead of developing the toolkit controls with the standard UserControl base class, they have instead opted to write classes based on ContentControl and other base classes. To pair up XAML with the “code behind” they did something really interesting. They engineered a pre-compile task to take XAML resource dictionaries and combine them into one resource dictionary for the project, the so called “generic.xaml” dictionary that provides styles and templates to control libraries (think DLL). I won’t go into a thorough explanation on this page (though I do explain the basic below), but I would invite you to check out the source code and take a look at the explanation of how it all worked here. [...]

By: Angie

Angie — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:45:41 +0000

I’ve figured this out. Moved my BuildTasks project out of my main solution, build the project, then updated the Controls project with the changes specified. I added the ItemGroup node initially, selected it for the relevant .xaml files, then removed the node. It appears to work without it. Thanks.

By: Angie

Angie — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:32:36 +0000

Thanks for this. I’m trying to get it working but struggling. It appears that the Task and DefaultStyle.cs are in a different project to the Silverlight controls. Should the above changes to the project file (UsingTask, ItemGroup and the two overridden targets) by made to the build tasks project or the controls project? I assumed the controls project, but it doesn’t seem to work and a file DefaultStyle is added to the controls project with a warning that it doesn’t exist. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

By: Gongdo

Gongdo — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:30:14 +0000

Great work! That’s what I wanted exactly!
I hope it’s going to be a part of Silverlight Tools.