I think you need a big caveat on your assertion that “keeping pace is always best”. I would qualify it with “when the benefits outweigh the costs”.

To give examples: LINQ and jQuery are (to me) obviously vast improvements on previous ways of doing things. This was self-evident within hours of playing with them. It would be hard to find any hard-core VB6 guys who dispute this.

On the other hand, I have wasted days of my life on WPF I will never get back, and still feel like I’m fumbling around in the dark. Ditto Silverlight. Not only from a technical point of view, but also in terms of their future relevance – are they dead-end technologies? One can now say fairly safely with hindsight that yes they’re definitely dead ends (thankfully). The trick is trying to pick what technologies will survive, when they are new and shiny. MS in particular make this very hard by pushing all their myriad new technologies with extreme gusto and hyperbole.

I love learning new things that allow me to work better and faster, but some critical thinking (and gambling) is required when choosing where to invest your precious time.

Thanks for the reply. It turns out the problem I found isn’t exactly related to your issue. It’s a problem with how SL loads resource dictionaries. Dictionaries loaded first aren’t available to those loaded later.

I implemented this solution and it works fine:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4152955/silverlight-shared-mergeddictionaries

Thanks for being on the way to finding it!
Derek

We’ve done two silverlight projects where I work (one of which I was the lead on) and neither was of the complexity where we needed styles broken out to the level referenced in the post. Unfortunately I don’t know of a workaround for you.

Thanks,
Brian