Silverlight 3 - MergedDictionaries

After having worked a while with Silverlight you realize that you often keep a lot of things in resources in your Xaml. Not only do you add Storyboards for your animations, but you often also add styles and templates, and some converters and so on. The resources all of the sudden start taking up most if the rows in your Xaml. It becomes hard to read. Especially since Silverlight is all about styling and templating controls, which results in large amounts of Xaml.

It is also hard to share resources. Say that you have these converters that you use in several of your controls. How do you solve that? Having them declared in multiple places is no good.

In Silverlight 2 there wasn’t much you could do. You would just have to have all of those resources in your Xaml, and if you wanted to share them, they had to be in the App.xaml file.

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