Strongly-Typed Resources in the .NET Framework 1.1

Strongly-typed resources are a new feature in the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. As such, the .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio 2003 do not support this feature. However, as you can see, this is a worthwhile feature and there is no technical reason why you shouldn't benefit from strongly-typed resources in Visual Studio 2003. To that end, I have written an equivalent to the StronglyTyped ResourceBuilder class for the .NET Framework 1.1, an equivalent utility to resgen.exe called ResClassGen.exe, and a custom tool that integrates this functionality into the Visual Studio 2003 IDE. These are available in the source code for this book. The generated code is almost the same as the generated code in the .NET Framework 2.0, so you can port the code to Visual Studio 2005 when necessary.