Icon Design and Tooling

I have to give a shout out to Inkscape what a fantastic tool for drawing and editing vector based icons (such as SVG files).  Thoroughly recommend it.  Its free and open source!

If it isn't suitable or you're looking for a cost effective way of producing professional icons or UI design check out https://www.fiverr.com/.  Its a market place to find, connect with, and hire services of just about any kind.

While you're waiting for your designer to draw your new icons, you can hire someone to pop balloons for you, or take a bath in baked beans.

Accessing .NET Embedded Resources

Accessing resources of any kind is usually done once inside a helper class or other mechanism that hides away the implementation details of how the resources are accessed. Or at least thats how I usually do it. Trouble is whenever its time to remember how to access the various kinds of resources I have to strain the remembering gland. Time for a post to store the information and free up some valuable brain memory kilobytes.

Here's a screen shot of my demo application showing different ways of accessing resources.

Some images are populated using Xaml and others using standard C# mechanisms.
Here's the structure of the application, note the two different images included in the Assets folder. One is set to the newer "Resource" content-type and the other to the old "EmbeddedResource".  The image in the DifferentAssembly is also a "Resource".  (Prefer Resource to the old EmbeddedResouce).

Xaml:

<Window 
    x:Class="ResourceAccessExample.MainWindow" 
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" 
    Height="350" 
    Title="MainWindow" 
    Width="525">

    <ScrollViewer>
        <StackPanel>
            <Border 
                BorderBrush="Black" 
                BorderThickness="1" 
                Margin="10" 
                Padding="10">
                <StackPanel>
                    <Image 
                        MaxHeight="75" 
                        Source="pack://application:,,,/assets/ChessMce.png" 
                        />
                    <TextBlock Text="Pack Url into same assembly" />
                </StackPanel>
            </Border>
            <Border 
                BorderBrush="Black" 
                BorderThickness="1" 
                Margin="10" 
                Padding="10">
                <StackPanel>
                    <Image 
                        MaxHeight="75" 
                        Source="pack://application:,,,/DifferentAssembly;component/UserGroup.png" 
                        />
                    <TextBlock Text="Pack Url into different assembly" />
                </StackPanel>
            </Border>
            <Border 
                BorderBrush="Black" 
                BorderThickness="1" 
                Margin="10" 
                Padding="10">
                <StackPanel>
                    <Image 
                        MaxHeight="75" 
                        Source="assets/ChessMce.png" 
                        />
                    <TextBlock Text="Relative Url into same assembly" />
                </StackPanel>
            </Border>
            <Border 
                BorderBrush="Black" 
                BorderThickness="1" 
                Margin="10" 
                Padding="10">
                <StackPanel>
                    <Image 
                        x:Name="Image2" 
                        MaxHeight="75" 
                        />
                    <TextBlock Text="Pulled from Resource Manifest using code Application static helper ('Resource')" />
                </StackPanel>
            </Border>
            <Border 
                BorderBrush="Black" 
                BorderThickness="1" 
                Margin="10" 
                Padding="10">
                <StackPanel>
                    <Image 
                        x:Name="Image3" 
                        MaxHeight="75" 
                        />
                    <TextBlock Text="Pulled from Resource Manifest using standard .NET Resource classes ('Resource')" />
                </StackPanel>
            </Border>
            <Border 
                BorderBrush="Black" 
                BorderThickness="1" 
                Margin="10" 
                Padding="10">
                <StackPanel>
                    <Image 
                        x:Name="Image4" 
                        MaxHeight="75" 
                        />
                    <TextBlock Text="Pulled from an old EmbeddedResource using standard .NET Resource classes ('Resource')" />
                </StackPanel>
            </Border>
        </StackPanel>
    </ScrollViewer>

</Window>

And the C# Code behind that populates the last three images using standard C# coding techniques:

public partial class MainWindow
    {
        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            Loaded += OnLoaded;
        }

        private void OnLoaded(object s, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            // Pull using the Application object (wpf only)
            var streamResourceInfo2 = Application.GetResourceStream(new Uri("assets/ChessMce.png", UriKind.Relative));
            if (streamResourceInfo2 != null)
            {
                var image = new BitmapImage();
                image.BeginInit();
                image.StreamSource = streamResourceInfo2.Stream;
                image.EndInit();
                this.Image2.Source = image;
            }

            // Using standard .NET resource classes.
            var assem = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly();
            var resourceManager = new ResourceManager(assem.GetName().Name + ".g", assem);
            using (ResourceSet set = resourceManager.GetResourceSet(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, true, true))
            {
                // Can loop thru them
                foreach (DictionaryEntry pair in set)
                {
                    Debug.WriteLine(pair.Key.ToString());
                }

                // Access an item directly
                var image = new BitmapImage();
                image.BeginInit();
                image.StreamSource = (Stream)set.GetObject("assets/ChessMce.png", true);
                image.EndInit();
                this.Image3.Source = image;
            }

            // Using an old Embedded Resource
            // this line of code is useful to figure out the name Vs has given the resource! The name is case sensitive.
            // var names = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceNames();
            using (Stream stream = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceStream("ResourceAccessExample.Assets.FreeCellMCE.png"))
            {
                var image = new BitmapImage();
                image.BeginInit();
                image.StreamSource = stream;
                image.EndInit();
                this.Image4.Source = image;
            }
        }
    }

Brain capacity recycled...