Resource Administration
Managing the resources in your application, even in a relatively small application, is no mean feat. Every button, every label, every groupBox, etc. has a Text property that needs to have a value associated with it. This chapter discusses two utilities written by the author: a Resource Administrator and a Visual Studio Add Resource String Add-In. Visual Studio 2005’s Resource Editor is considerably better than its Visual Studio 2003 counter-part – the Resource Administration tool provided by the author allows a Visual Studio 2003 user to enjoy Visual Studio 2005 functionality.
The author proceeds to walk-though a typical usage scenario, using a mixture of explanatory text and screenshots. I was pleased to see that an Integrity Check routine is built into the Resource Administration utility – it looks through all the resources seeking out missing entries. A good sanity check.
Adding resource strings, as the author states, is something that is often postponed. If you are a developer and you are “in the zone”, the last thing on your mind is adding a resource string. The Resource String Add-In helps make that process quicker and encourages the creation of resource strings as and when they are required, i.e. during development rather than as an afterthought. Since the book currently targets both Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005, the author very kindly explains how we go about installing the Add-In in both versions.
The source code for both utilities, the Resource Administration utility and the Add Resource String Add-In is supplied as part of the download material for this book.
The remainder of this chapter goes on to explain how the utilities go about reading and writing resources. Extensibility is one of the author’s goals for these utilities. If you are interested in the low-level detail of how these utilities work, this chapter is worth reading.
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