Data binding ViewModel to View inside statically-loaded assembly

Question

I am writing a library which our main WPF GUI project loads statically at runtime, using Reflection. My class library attempts to load a ViewModel with the intent of showing its associated view in the WPF GUI. This doesn't seem to work. Is this because WPF cannot access the bindings I've declared inside my library? I have a file called CommonResources.resx in the library which looks like this:

<ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
                    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
                    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
                    xmlns:vm="clr-namespace:Plugin.ViewModel"
                    xmlns:v="clr-namespace:Plugin.View"
                     xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
                     mc:Ignorable="d">
    <vm:ViewModelLocator x:Key="Locator" d:IsDataSource="True" />
    <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type vm:MyViewModel}">
        <v:MyView/>
    </DataTemplate>
</ResourceDictionary>

How do I get the WPF magic to happen when the main GUI tries to show MyViewModel?

Answer 1

Sorry, to be not so precise since the code you are showing does not reflect the lifting you are doing to load you plugins. And it is not really representative for your question, but in general...

Have you considered to look at MEF - Managed Extensibility Framework? There are a lot of articles how to structure MVVM applications to load views with viewmodel on runtime. The fits also very well with the viewmodel locator pattern.

There is a nice(but old) video series form mike taulty on how to use mef with silverlight. Since Silverlight was a subset of WPF/XAML the concepts still apply even if technology is slightly different so you might want to adapt.

But certainly worth watching because it give you an idea how to construct a plugin architecture and how mef works.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/mtaulty/MEF--Silverlight-4-Beta-Part-1-Introduction (each video has a link to it's next in the series)

HTH