Welcome to Resource Explorer!

In writing the resources chapter of my WinForms book, I found that there was no single utility for displaying the contents of assemblies, .resx files and .resource files (even embedded .resources files) in a way that made sense to me. So, I built one and called it ResourceExplorer.

ResourceExplorer is very simple and could stand some extension to show specific resources at images, text, data, etc, but it certainly served my needs, especially when it came to understanding the usage and limitations of the ResourceReader (for reading .resources files) and the ResXResourceReader (for reading .resx files). Enjoy.

Usage

To use the ResourceExplorer, build it (a pre-built version is provided in bin\Release), run it and use the File->Open menu item to open any .NET assembly, .resx file or .resources file. When navigating from resource to resource, the status bar shows the current string representation of the selected resource.

Limitations

• It won't open every version of every format, unfortunately, but the default exception handler is enough to continue onto something else when things go wrong.
• There is code to handle the Enter key and double-clicking on a resource, but it doesn't do anything. This would be a good place to add support for showing the various kinds of data that are embedded, e.g. images, strings, etc. Contributions are welcome!

History

• 1/10/03: Initial release

Copyright

Copyright © 2003 Chris Sells

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, subject to the following restrictions:

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation is requested, as shown here:
   
   Portions copyright © 2003 Chris Sells (http://www.sellsbrothers.com/).
    
2. No substantial portion of this source code may be redistributed without the express written permission of the copyright holders, where "substantial" is defined as enough code to be recognizably from this code.