Creating Menus, Dialogs, & Other Resources for Microsoft's Free Visual Studio Express Tools

Microsoft provides several "Visual Studio Express" tools for free download. These are slightly limited versions of their popular development tools for C++, C#, and Visual Basic. These tools are great if you are learning to program or if you are just tinkering. They have just about every feature you normally want for doing software development by yourself (as opposed to being a part of a large team).

While I enjoy having these tools for free, and most of the missing features I don't notice. Except for one: resource editing. If you want to add icons, dialogs, or menus to your C++ programs, you'll have to manually create an RC file. Or do you?

To find out, I went looking for an open source resource editor. Of course, I could just break down and install my real copies of Visual C++ or even break out some other commercial resource editors I have, but I wanted a free solution to go along with the free Visual Studio Express product. I looked pretty hard and I couldn't find a single tool that did what I wanted. However, I did find two tools that together would do the job.

The first tool is the excellent XN Resource Editor. What doesn't this tool do? It will create menus, icons, dialogs, cursors, and everything else you can think of. Oh yeah, but while it will read RC files, I couldn't find any way to make it save an RC file! It will, however, do a nice job saving to a binary res file.

Of course, you could just leave it at that and let Visual Studio include the .res file. So I guess you can just use one tool. But I wanted an RC file that I could easily manipulate -- at least for strings and IDs.

That's when I downloaded Resource Hacker. This tool is made to load resources from just about anywhere. You can do certain things with those resources (although you can't actually edit them). However, this tool will save a proper RC file.

So the steps are:

1. Use XN Resource Editor to create your resources
2. Save resources as a .RES file
3. Open the .RES file with Resource Hacker
4. Save as a .RC file
5. Add the RC file to your Visual Studio project.

You may have to touch up your RC file a little if you get any errors (for example, include winuser.h).

XN can read an RC file, so you can "round trip" by reading the file from step 4 into XN, making changes, and then repeating steps 2 through 4.