Set resource URI of .xaml component

Question

I have a .xaml UserControl named MyUserControl.xaml and I want to set its resource URI.

Per default, WPF generates a URI that includes a resource name, which is equal to the resource it belongs to such as

"/MyNamespace;component/myusercontrol.xaml"

for the .xaml named MyUserControl.xaml

How can I have a UserControl MyUserControl.xaml and make WPF generate an individual resource identifies such as

"/MyNamespace;component/myusercontrol_A.xaml" or "/MyNamespace;component/myusercontrol_B.xaml" ?

The reason why I want to do that is described here.

In the image below you can see the resource identifier I am talking about:

and therein:

Answer 1

Note, that that question is the origin of this question and might help to understand its background.

After a week suffering and laboring with this issue, I finally found both the reason for the problem and its solution.

The problem lies within the auto-generated *.g.i.cs file, which is called by the InitializeComponent() method of a UserControl, as seen by the following:

This file generates a string (a Resource Locator) that expresses the path to that xaml-component, as seen by the following:

Now, if you have multiple versions of the same assembly and both versions include the same xaml-file, WPF does not know what xaml-file to instantiate, because the Resource Locator only references the name of the assembly but not its version.

This results in a TargetInvocationException, saying that

{"The component 'MyNamespace.MyUserControl' does not have a resource identified by the URI '/MyAssembly;comoponent/myusercontrol.xaml'"}

as follows:

The simple (but most definitely not obvious) solution for this is to add the version of the assembly to this Resource Locator. This can be achieved by modifying the build-file of the project by adding the <AssemblyVersion>-tag as follows:

Credits for this go to:

• this blog
• this SO thread