Mastering Windows Presentation Foundation

Making more efficient resources

When we reference our resources, we can either use a StaticResource or a DynamicResource. If you remember from Chapter 5, Using The Right Controls for The Job, a StaticResource will look up the value of the resource just once, which is comparative to a compile-time lookup. A DynamicResource will repeatedly look up the value of the resource each time it is requested, whether it has changed or not, like a runtime lookup.

For this reason, we should only ever use a DynamicResource if we really need to and can attain much better performance by using the StaticResource class instead. If we find that we need to use a lot of DynamicResource references to access our resources, then we can refactor our code to data bind to ...