Assembly-level initialization at design time

One sorely missing feature from the Blend 4 Beta is the ability to have a method in which you can perform initialization work specific to design-time.  Such a method is useful for tasks like loading design-time data services into a container, configuring MEF with design-time specific dependencies, and basically anything else that you might otherwise do at startup when the application runs.  Since your App class won’t be started up when in design mode, it would be great if there was a way for Blend to call a method designated for that purpose at design-time.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently.  Initially I thought that Blend could provide an attribute that I could apply to a static method, and it would then invoke that decorated method before loading any Views.  That seemed like the best solution (and still does, in my opinion).  However, since Blend has no such attribute, I figured it was a moot point…until I realized that I could create my own attribute for the same purpose!

If you decorate an assembly with an attribute, that attribute must be instantiated when the assembly is inspected via reflection (which Blend most certainly does).  So, I simply created a custom attribute and applied it to my assembly.  In that attribute’s constructor, I check to see if it was loaded into design-time.  If it was, I then perform my initialization logic.  How simple!

Read more: Josh Smith on WPF

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