Alias to static class in XAML

Question

For localization I have one resx file per XAML file. They lie in the same directory and namespace. The resx name corresponds to the XAML name with the word Resources appended.

I access the resources like this:

<TextBlock Text="{x:Static r:MainWindowResources.SomeText}"/>

Since I find this quite lengthy (and there are even longer class names) I was wondering if there was some way I could define an alias to MainWindowResources. In C# I can do this with a using directive.

It would be a lot easier if the generated resource file wrapper wouldn't be a class with static properties. A possible solution would be to use a wrapper instance which inherits from DynamicObject. You could pass it a type and access the type's static members through it. Then you'd add an instance of this wrapper as a resource in XAML.

But I'd lose IntelliSense support and it probably wouldn't be great performance-wise either.

Another solution would be to use the WPF Localization Extension but I'd also lose IntelliSense support. Plus I'm curios whether there is any other way to create an alias to a static class. :)

Answer 1

No, there is no way to simply alias the class name in Xaml like you would in C# with using.

A custom markup extension with a short name is probably the best you could do, but as you say, you would lose editor completion support. If you're really desperate, you could write a T4 template that would generate an enum with one value for each string in your resource file, and then you could use an enum value as your markup extension parameter with completion support (e.g., {l:MainWindowString SomeText}), but that seems like a lot of work just to shorten some Xaml attributes, and they wouldn't be that much shorter.

I would just stick with what you have.