'Cannot register duplicate name 'XXX' in this scope' in VS 2010

Here’s a gotcha that was puzzling me yesterday.

I’ve just installed Visual Studio 2010 RC, and was trying it out on my current project. It’s a Silverlight Navigation-style project, but that’s not important to the bug.

I found one page where the Xaml designer wouldn’t handle the page properly – it was throwing exceptions, and the editor was showing an error in the Xaml. The line looked like this:

<local:SimpleConverter x:Name="SimpleConverter"/>

This is a value converter, designed to convert bindings from one type to another. The error it was showing was ‘Cannot register duplicate name ‘SimpleConverter’ in this scope’. This foxed me for a while – I thought perhaps because I was throwing exceptions when I didn’t recognise the type being converted, but even removing that and simplifying didn’t remove the error.

Then I noticed the key word in the error message: ‘Name’.

In Xaml you can use x:Name if you want something in the Xaml linked up to a class variable in your code-behind. But that was clearly causing issues with whatever the designer was doing behind the scenes. However, if you don’t need code-behind access (as I don’t in this case) you can use x:Key – and that’s the usual mechanism for naming resources.

Changing the resource to:

<local:SimpleConverter x:Key="SimpleConverter"/>

then the errors from the visual designer stop happening.

Of course, I’ve no idea if the errors are a bug in the designer, or if it’s just wrong to use x:Name in resources, but since I didn’t need the autowiring up of objects, it’s no problem to change it.