Right Tool for the Job: MergedDictionaries

Question

I work on a large Silverlight project. We split the app up into many XAPs and DLLs in order to download the bare minimum the user needs at the time.

For simplicity, if I want to share a brush across multiple xaps and libraries what is the right tool for this job? 

The only reasonable tool I'm aware of is MergedDictionaries. However if I use MergedDictionaries I loose "View in Blend" support in VS2010, and instead have to open my entire SLN in blend so that blend can resolve cross library URIs (example: Source="/Library;component/Brushes.xaml").

On top of that I've come across the following links: 

• How do I get WYSIWYG design in Blend/VS without merged ResourceDictionary in every XAML file?
• Huge performance problems with ResourceDictionary (MergedDictionaries)

These talk about performance problems with MergedDictionaries and the forums link solution is to reference only once from the App.xaml. If I do this I loose designer support in both blend and VS2010. Firstly, do these performance problems still exist? Secondly, this all feels like a hack, which makes me feel like I'm using the wrong tool for the job. Is there a better one out there?

Summary:

1. If I want to share a brush across multiple xaps and libraries what is the right tool for this job?
   
2. Do performance issues still exist for MergedDictionaries?
3. Is there a solution that doesn't feel like a hack?

Thanks for your time,

Trey

Answer 1

If you want to use it across xaps, maybe MEF is a way:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/glenn.block/archive/2009/12/15/building-hello-mef-part-iii-xap-partitioning-with-the-host-s-permission-and-the-sweetness-of-recomposition.aspx

Answer 2

Thank you for the reply Nangua.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this post as answered. I ended up using MergedDictionaries with a cross library URI. This sacrificed "View in Blend" support, as I need to open the whole SLN for the URI to resolve.

I have not yet noticed the noted memory hit concerns.