MergedDictionaries and Resource lookup

Question

i have a problem with Resource dictionaries and mergeddictionaries in general, especially when it comes to resource-lookup performance. After some performance testing i found that ResourceDictionary.get_MergedDictionaries is the call with the most hits (checked in ANTS profiler). We have around ~300 resource dictionary xamls, and a lot of them are using merged dictionary to "include" other styles. Well the get_MergedDictionaries count on one part of our application, where not much is happening, was around 10 million hits. So my guess is we are doing something completely wrong with Resource dictionaries in general. So i tried to refactor everything and i want to try to get rid of all the merged dictionaries.

Now to the actual question. I tried to get rid of the mergeddictionaries but i failed. My understanding is that when you use StaticResource the lookup needs the resource to be defined before the current one. I made the following short example:

One main project and one custom control library.

the custom control library contains 2 xamls.

<!-- Colors.xaml -->
<ResourceDictionary [stripped namespaces] >
    <SolidColorBrush x:Key="myColor" Color="Green"/>
</ResourceDictionary>

<!-- Templates.xaml -->
<ResourceDictionary [stripped namespaces]>
    <ControlTemplate x:Key="myTemplate" TargetType="Button">
        <Rectangle Fill="{StaticResource myColor}"/>
    </ControlTemplate>
</ResourceDictionary>

Now in the main project, the MainWindow.xaml looks like this

<Window x:Class="ResourceTest.Window1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
    <Window.Resources>
        <ResourceDictionary>
            <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
                <ResourceDictionary Source="/ResourceTestLib;component/Themes/Colors.xaml"/>
                <ResourceDictionary Source="/ResourceTestLib;component/Themes/Template.xaml"/>
            </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
        </ResourceDictionary>
    </Window.Resources>
    <Grid>
        <Button Template="{StaticResource myTemplate}"/>
    </Grid>
</Window>

That is the desired goal. but unfortunately this crashes because the resource "myColor" cannot be found. I of course know how to fix it, add a mergeddictionary in Templates.xaml and reference Colors.xaml but i always thought, well i never really checked, that resources are looked up depending on the logical tree and the resources of the element. My understanding is; Button is created; try to lookup template .. found; try to lookup color, not found on own resources, walk up and use the windows resources.

It seems that i'm wrong. So i hope someone can shed some light on this for me. We make heavy use of WPF and despite of this we accomplished a lot with it, but because of some wrong learned behaviour in the beginning, our performance is pretty bad just because of the resource lookup. Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance Best regards Nico

Answer 1

Well I don't like answering my own question, but I guess a lot of people might stumble into this and I want to give them our current solution as an option to consider.

Like I said before, we have a lot of XAMLs, around ~300 for all different kinds of things like Shared Resources (Brushes, Colors) but also many XAMLs containing different DataTemplates, Styles for controls and also for Custom Controls. In the beginning this approach of having a lot of XAMLs was reasonable for us, because we do the same with our classes and keep them small and organized. Unfortunately, WPF doesn't like that. The more ResourceDictionaries you have and the more you merge them via MergedDictionaries the worse your performance will get. The best advice I can give you is, use as few ResourceDictionary XAMLs as possible.

We bit the bullet and merged a lot of them into one giant XAML, in fact we do this now with a pre-compiler keeping the best of both worlds. We can use as many XAMLs as we want, just following a few constraints, and merging them on a compile in a giant XAML. The performance increase we get was remarkable. In my question I wrote "11 million hits on getMergedDictionaries" ... just "precompiling" one of our assemblies, we went down to 2million hits and the performance is in the whole application at all times a lot better.

So in the end. XAML resources should not be considered as source code that gets compiled, instead it should be understand as an actual resource that, when declared, exists, takes up space and performance.

Well we had to learn that the hard way. I hope everyone reading this can improve their projects by learning from our mistakes.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

Best regards Nico