Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

Binary Resources

Although ResourceDictionary and the resource scope system are fine for data that can easily be contained in an object, not all resources fit comfortably into this model. Often we need to deal with binary streams. For example, images, audio, and video have efficient binary representations, but they are not particularly at home in markup, and in the world of objects they are usually represented by wrappers for the underlying data. Markup itself also presents a challenge: XAML pages must somehow get built into our applications. So a means of dealing with binary streams is needed.

WPF does not introduce any new technology for dealing with binary data. The .NET Framework has always provided mechanisms for dealing with embedded binary streams, and WPF simply uses these.

The lowest level of stream support lets you embed resource streams into any assembly. This is a simple matter of supplying the files you would like to embed to the compiler. In Visual Studio, you do this by setting a file's Build Action property to Embedded Resource. This copies the contents of the file into the assembly as an embedded stream. The stream can be retrieved at runtime using the Assembly class's GetManifestResourceStream method, as Example 12-26 shows.

Example 12-26. Retrieving assembly manifest resources

Assembly asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(  );
Stream s = asm.GetManifestResourceStream("StreamName");

Streams embedded in this way are called assembly manifest resources. Although WPF ultimately ...