Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Resources

WPF offers us great flexibility in how we construct an application's user interface. But with great power comes great responsibility—we must avoid bewildering the user with a garish and inconsistent frontend. Styles and templates allow us to take control of our application's visuals, but these features depend on the resource system in WPF to make it easy to build visually consistent applications without sacrificing flexibility. If you want to build a graphically distinctive application, the resource system provides a straightforward way to skin your applications with customized yet consistent visuals. But by default, the resource mechanism simply ensures consistency with the system-wide OS theme chosen by the user.

In this chapter, we will look at how the resource system lets us plug in visual features where they are needed. Not only will we see how to ensure that the right look and feel is applied to our application at runtime, but we will also look at how the resource system lets you reuse objects or groups of objects such as drawings. Furthermore, we will look at how to manage binary resource streams and how to localize applications.

Creating and Using Resources

The term resource has a very broad meaning—in WPF, any object can be a resource. A brush or a color used in various parts of a user interface could be a resource. Snippets of graphics or text can be resources. An object does not have to do anything special to qualify as a resource. The resource handling ...