How to apply multiple styles in WPF

I think the simple answer is that you can't do (at least in this version of WPF) what you are trying to do.

That is, for any particular element only one Style can be applied.

However, as others have stated above, maybe you can use BasedOn to help you out. Check out the following piece of loose xaml. In it you will see that I have a base style that is setting a property that exists on the base class of the element that I want to apply two styles to. And, in the second style which is based on the base style, I set another property.

So, the idea here ... is if you can somehow separate the properties that you want to set ... according the inheritance hierarchy of the element you want to set multiple styles on ... you might have a workaround.

<Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
    <Page.Resources>
        <Style x:Key="baseStyle" TargetType="FrameworkElement">
            <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left"/>
        </Style>
        <Style TargetType="Button" BasedOn="{StaticResource baseStyle}">
            <Setter Property="Content" Value="Hello World"/>
        </Style>
    </Page.Resources>
    <Grid>
        <Button Width="200" Height="50"/>
    </Grid>
</Page>

Hope this helps.

Note:

One thing in particular to note. If you change the TargetType in the second style (in first set of xaml above) to ButtonBase, the two Styles do not get applied. However, check out the following xaml below to get around that restriction. Basically, it means you need to give the Style a key and reference it with that key.

<Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
    <Page.Resources>
        <Style x:Key="baseStyle" TargetType="FrameworkElement">
            <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left"/>
        </Style>
        <Style x:Key="derivedStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" BasedOn="{StaticResource baseStyle}">
            <Setter Property="Content" Value="Hello World"/>
        </Style>
    </Page.Resources>
    <Grid>
        <Button Width="200" Height="50" Style="{StaticResource derivedStyle}"/>
    </Grid>
</Page>

But you can extend from another.. take a look at the BasedOn property

<Style TargetType="TextBlock">
      <Setter Property="Margin" Value="3" />
</Style>

<Style x:Key="AlwaysVerticalStyle" TargetType="TextBlock" 
       BasedOn="{StaticResource {x:Type TextBlock}}">
     <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Top" />
</Style>

WPF/XAML doesn't provide this functionality natively, but it does provide the extensibility to allow you to do what you want.

We ran into the same need, and ended up creating our own XAML Markup Extension (which we called "MergedStylesExtension") to allow us to create a new Style from two other styles (which, if needed, could probably be used multiple times in a row to inherit from even more styles).

Due to a WPF/XAML bug, we need to use property element syntax to use it, but other than that it seems to work ok. E.g.,

<Button
    Content="This is an example of a button using two merged styles">
    <Button.Style>
      <ext:MergedStyles
                BasedOn="{StaticResource FirstStyle}"
                MergeStyle="{StaticResource SecondStyle}"/>
   </Button.Style>
</Button>

I recently wrote about it here: http://swdeveloper.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/wpf-xaml-multiple-style-inheritance-and-markup-extensions/

if you are not touching any specific properties, you can get all base and common properties to the style which's target type would be FrameworkElement. then, you can create specific flavours for each target types you need, without need of copying all those common properties again.

You can probably get something similar if applying this to a collection of items by the use of a StyleSelector, i have used this to approach a similar problem in using different styles on TreeViewItems depending on the bound object type in the tree. You may have to modify the class below slightly to adjust to your particular approach but hopefully this will get you started

public class MyTreeStyleSelector : StyleSelector
{
    public Style DefaultStyle
    {
        get;
        set;
    }

    public Style NewStyle
    {
        get;
        set;
    }

    public override Style SelectStyle(object item, DependencyObject container)
    {
        ItemsControl ctrl = ItemsControl.ItemsControlFromItemContainer(container);

        //apply to only the first element in the container (new node)
        if (item == ctrl.Items[0])
        {
            return NewStyle;
        }
        else
        {
            //otherwise use the default style
            return DefaultStyle;
        }
    }
}

You then apply this as so

 <TreeView>
     <TreeView.ItemContainerStyleSelector
         <myassembly:MyTreeStyleSelector DefaultStyle="{StaticResource DefaultItemStyle}"
                                         NewStyle="{StaticResource NewItemStyle}" />
     </TreeView.ItemContainerStyleSelector>
  </TreeView>

Sometimes you can approach this by nesting panels. Say you have a Style which changes Foreground and another changes FontSize, you can apply the latter one on a TextBlock, and put it in a Grid which its Style is the first one. This might help and might be the easiest way in some cases, though it won't solve all the problems.

If you are trying to apply a unique style to just one single element as an addition to a base style, there is a completely different way to do this that is IMHO much better for readable and maintainable code.

It's extremely common to need to tweak parameters per individual element. Defining dictionary styles just for use on one-element is extremely cumbersome to maintain or make sense of. To avoid creating styles just for one-off element tweaks, read my answer to my own question here here:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/54497665/1402498