Subclassing and Hooking with Visual Basic

Using the Resource

After the resource file (.RES) is created, there are two ways to use it within a subclassing application in VB. The first way is to simply add the resource file to the application. The second way is to add the resource file to a DLL and load the resource from this DLL. There is a reason for using each method to incorporate a resource into a project. If an application is running in the IDE at design time, the resource must be in a DLL. When the application is running as a standalone EXE, the resource can be embedded into the EXE as a .RES file, or it can be contained within a DLL. This is a limitation of VB, not of the resource file.

No other application can access the dialog template resource if it is embedded within this application as a .RES file because they are running in separate processes. Placing a resource in a separate DLL allows multiple applications to access the same resources. A single application also can access multiple resource DLLs.

VB has three functions for loading and using resources: LoadResString, LoadResData, and LoadResPicture. Although LoadResString and LoadResPicture are functions that load particular kinds of data (strings and images, respectively) from resource files, LoadResData is a general-purpose function for retrieving items from resource files. Its syntax is:

LoadResData(resID, resType)

where resID is the identifier of the resource, and resType is an integer that identifies the type of resource that’s being loaded. To load ...