I’m building a WPF application where the Views are located in a separate project (e.g., MyApp.Views), while App.xaml is in the main project (MyApp). In App.xaml, I reference resources from the Views project, like this:

<Application x:Class="MyApp.App"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
    <Application.Resources>
        <ResourceDictionary>
            <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
                <ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/MyApp.Views;component/Resources/Icons.xaml" />
                <ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/MyApp.Views;component/Resources/Styles.xaml" />
            </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
        </ResourceDictionary>
    </Application.Resources>
</Application>

At runtime, everything works fine, but in design-time (when opening a UserControl in the designer), I get errors like: The resource “Some Icon” could not be resolved.

Project Structure:

• MyApp
  Main project containing App.xaml. It references MyApp.Views.
• MyApp.Views
  Contains the UserControls, Resource dictionaries and everything else UI related.

Example UserControl:

<UserControl x:Class="MyApp.Views.AddressBarView"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" 
             xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
             mc:Ignorable="d" 
             d:DesignHeight="450" d:DesignWidth="800">
    <Grid>
        <Button>
            <Image Source="{StaticResource MyIcon}" />
        </Button>
    </Grid>
</UserControl>

My question is how can I configure my project so that resources from App.xaml are available in the Views (located in a separate project) during design-time?

So right now i use a temporary solution to this problem, i just add a resource to usercontrol, like this:

<UserControl.Resources>
    <ResourceDictionary Source="/MyApp.Views;component/MyPathToResource/Icons.xaml" />
</UserControl.Resources>

And it works, but I don’t want to add to my every UserControl resource like that