What did I miss when setting up materialdesign toolkit for WPF?

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I built a WPF app in VS 2015 that includes a custom UserControl. Then I installed the MaterialDesignXAMLToolkit package (from nuget) and followed the instructions in Getting Started · MaterialDesignInXAML/MaterialDesignInXamlToolkit Wiki · GitHub[^] . As expected, the styling changed on many of the controls, but not everything is working as I think it should:

1) The setup instructions have me add these attributes to the MainWindow:

TextElement.Foreground="{DynamicResource MaterialDesignBody}"
Background="{DynamicResource MaterialDesignPaper}"

Visual Studio complains that it can't find those Resources. It doesn't have trouble finding the Button Style resources I applied to my UserControl. Why can't it find these two?

2) The documentation seems to indicate that I should be able to reference theme colors to use in other <Style> elements, but I have not been able to figure out how.

3) I see from available videos that I should be able to add controls from the Toolkit into my ToolBox, but when I browse to the DLLs for that purpose, there are no importable controls there.

I haven't been able to find the right instruction to fill my knowledge gap on this. What am I missing?

Update:

None of these are blocking me, but I want to make sure I have everything set up correctly before I start customizing things.

I found the answer to #2 in the Wiki.

I cloned the source code and got the Demo working. (It's not as easy as implied in the docs.) That has helped my understanding.

I'm beginning to wonder if the cause of #1 is just that the document is out of date.

What I have tried:

I have double-checked my execution of the instructions in the Getting Started document.
I have confirmed the added DLLs are in the References.
I have watched 4 introductory videos on using the Toolkit.

Posted 11-Aug-20 7:45am

John Whitmire

Updated 13-Aug-20 0:42am

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[no name] 12-Aug-20 12:19pm

Just ignore those statements if it means you can't get up and running. If you can't find those 2 names using a global solution search then you are missing something but (dynamic resource) "colors" aren't the end of the world; set static ones if you have to.

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Richard Deeming · Answer 1 · 2020-08-13T00:42:00

The MaterialDesignBody and MaterialDesignPaper styles are defined in the theme. If your running application can't find them, then it looks like you've missed part of the setup:

Getting Started · Configuring your App.xaml[^]

A final App.xaml should look something like this:

XML

<Application x:Class="Example.App" ... xmlns:materialDesign="http://materialdesigninxaml.net/winfx/xaml/themes" ...>
    <Application.Resources>
        <ResourceDictionary>
            <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
                <materialDesign:BundledTheme BaseTheme="Light" PrimaryColor="DeepPurple" SecondaryColor="Lime" />
                <ResourceDictionary Source="pack://application:,,,/MaterialDesignThemes.Wpf;component/Themes/MaterialDesignTheme.Defaults.xaml" /> 
            </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
        </ResourceDictionary>
    </Application.Resources>
</Application>

If you don't have either materialDesign:BundledTheme or materialDesign:CustomColorTheme in your merged dictionaries, then the dynamic resources will not be found.