Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

RESOURCE FILES

Resource files contain text, images, and other data for the application to load at run time. The intent of resource files is to let you easily replace one set of resources with another.

One of the most common reasons for using resource files is to provide different resources for different languages. To create installation packages for different languages, you simply ship the executable and a resource file that uses the right language. Alternatively, you can ship resource files for all of the languages you support and then let the application pick the appropriate file at run time based on the user’s computer settings.

Resource files are not intended to store application configuration information and settings. They are intended to hold values that you might want to change, but only infrequently. You should store frequently changing data in configuration files or the system registry rather than in resource files.

The distinction is small and frankly somewhat artificial. Both configuration files and resource files store data that you can swap without recompiling the application. Rebuilding resource files can be a little more complex, however, so perhaps the distinction that configuration and setting data changes more frequently makes some sense.

Resource files can also be embedded within a compiled application. In that case, you cannot swap the resource file without recompiling the application. Although this makes embedded resource files less useful for storing frequently ...