How to read WPF ResourceDictionaries from WinForms

Posted on 31 August 2015 at 14:13

When you add resources dictionaries to an WPF project the build action is automatically set to Page. This means that the compiler generates a BAML stream and adds it to the resources of the assembly.

Since WPF has the built-in functionality to read a BAML stream but its API is not public, we have to write a little helper class that access the internal method by using reflection.

 
public static class BamlReader
{
    public static object Load(Stream stream)
    {
        ParserContext pc = new ParserContext();
        MethodInfo loadBamlMethod = typeof(XamlReader).GetMethod("LoadBaml", 
            BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static)
        return loadBamlMethod.Invoke(null, new object[] { stream, pc, null, false });
    }
}

 
StreamResourceInfo sri = System.Windows.Application.GetResourceStream(
    new Uri("/MyAssemblyName;component/MyResourceDict.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
    ResourceDictionary resources = (ResourceDictionary)BamlReader.Load(sri.Stream);