I'd find this functionality kinda handy. Loading resources from the exe is very simple, and it would not be too difficult to extend the Win32::GUI::Bitmap, Icon, etc. objects to accept an additional argument that indicates that the resource should be loaded from the exe rather than from a real file on disk (in fact, it would actually be a trivial matter to do this).
What is less trivial is getting the resources in there in the first place. While ResHacker lets you do it, it'd be nice to see a Win32::GUI native way of doing it. Microsoft provides functions for adding, deleting and replacing resources in executable files and I propose we either: 1. Add this update/add/delete functionality into Win32::GUI so that applications can fiddle with their own resources. This may be an exceptionally bad idea (what exe file will it think it's using when running straight from Perl? We dont want it messing with perl.exe's resources) 2. Create a small tool that is distributed with Win32::GUI to pack resources into the exe. I doubt we can re-dist ResHacker with win32::gui and it'd be nice if there was this functionality provided. The Win32::GUI::Bitmap, Icon and Cursor objects could then be modified to first check for a resource identified by the given filename in the current running exe, and if it's not found attempt to use the given filename to load an external file. This seems the best mode of operation to me. Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: Jez White To: Win32-GUI Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 6:34 PM Subject: [perl-win32-gui-users] Shipping resources with your exe Hi, One the problems I have when I ship my exe is ensuring that all the resources (bitmaps, cursors and config files) are valid when my app starts up. Typically, just including them in a sub directory can cause problems since the user could delete or alter them. The ideal solution would be to package the resources into the exe and extract them at runtime. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/winui/WinUI/WindowsUserInterface/Resources.asp Adding the resources to the exe is quite straightforward (with reshacker) but I'm not sure how easy it would be to implement these function calls (or even it is possible), would anyone find this kind of functionality useful? Cheers, jez.
