How to assign WPF resources to other resource tags

Question

This is quite obscure, I may just be missing something extremely simple.

Scenario 1

Lets say I create a gradient brush, like this in my

Answer 1

I was wondering when someone was going to ask about this.

What you want to do in Scenario 1 is to effectively give a single resource an "alias." This is easily done by markup that seems obvious only after you see it. Suppose we have this in our App.xaml or somewhere:

To include an alias in another ResourceDictionary, just:

This looks up the brush object in the first ResourceDictionary and adds the same object to the second ResourceDictionary under a new key. This also works within a single ResourceDictionary.

For your Scenario 2 the solution is just as simple:

Again, the actual Brush objects found via the ResourceKey are added directly to the Brush[] array. No new Brush is created.

I think we're all so used to using StaticResourceExtension with markup extension syntax (eg {StaticResource Xyz}) that it's easy to forget that it can also be used with regular element syntax as well.