Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

HIDDEN FILES

Figure 13-1 shows the Solution Explorer window for a solution that contains two projects. The solution named MySolution contains two projects named WindowsApplication1 and WindowsApplication2. Each project contains a My Project item that represents the project’s properties, various files containing project configuration settings, and a form named Form1.

FIGURE 13-1: A solution contains one or more projects that contain files.

In WindowsApplication2, the Show All Files button has been clicked (the highlighted button third from the right at the top of the picture) so that you can see all the project’s files. WindowsApplication1 has similar files, but they are hidden by default.

These files are generated by Visual Basic for various purposes. For example, Resources.resx contains resources used by the project and Settings.settings contains project settings.

RESOURCES AND SETTINGS

Resources are chunks of data that are distributed with the application but that are not intended to be modified by the program. (Technically, you can change resource values, but then they are acting more as settings than resources, so I won’t cover that here. In fact, changing resources in a strongly named resource file raises an alarm indicating that someone may have tampered with the file.) These might include prompt strings, error message strings, icons, and sound files.

For example, resources ...