Introduction

The Resource ID Organiser (ResOrg for short) is an Add-in for Visual C++ designed to help overcome one of the most annoying (and unnecessary) chores of developing/maintaining Windows applications - maintaining resource symbol ID values.

A typical Visual C++ project will contain at least resource (.RC) file. Associated with each is a symbol definition file (named "resource.h" by default) which contains #define directives for each of the symbols used in the project.

Resource symbol definitions are created and modified by the Visual C++ resource editor when the resources for a project are edited. Unfortunately, when it does so it often gets it wrong. How often have you seen this message box whilst editing a dialog:

...even when the symbol names are different? This happens because two symbols with the same value are used in  the same dialog template, and usually arises as a direct result of the way the resource editor allocates symbols.

The problem is that the editor is not particularly intelligent in the way it allocates symbol ID values - and does not provide any facilities to unravel the mess that can all too easily arise as a result. The end result can be a  large number of conflicting resource symbol values or even unpredictable behaviour at runtime.

Enter the Resource ID Organiser

ResOrg came about as a result of the sheer frustration of repeatedly renumbering resource symbols in a large multi-module project (75 modules, and over 3000 symbols) by hand or by using Excel. Surprisingly, there aren't any other tools to perform this seemingly straightforward task, though there is a macro on CodeGuru which does something similar - see the article (Sequentially Renumber Resource IDs).

ResOrg facilities to manage resource symbols at file, module and solution level:

There are actually two versions of ResOrg. As well as add-ins for Visual C++ 5.0/6.0 and .NET, a standalone application is available which has the same functionality. All versions are capable of reading Visual C++ solutions and offer equivalent functionality.

Features

ResOrg offers many features to help make managing resource symbol files easier, of which the following are a small selection:

• Easy to interpret displays of the symbols within resource files.
   
• Detection of out of range and conflicting symbols, both within and between resource symbol files.
   
• Detection and correction of incorrect "Next Symbol" values.
   
• Customisable HTML reports.
   
• Manual and automated symbol renumbering.
   
• Automatic exclusion of specified symbols (such as IDR_MAINFRAME) from renumbering operations
   
•  Available as both a Visual C++ add-in and a standalone application.
   
• Compatible with Visual C++ 5.0, 6.0, .NET 2002, 2003 and 2005.

More information on ResOrg features

Credits

ResOrg in its current form would not have been possible without the existence of CodeProject, CodeGuru and MSDN Magazine (formerly Microsoft Systems Journal). Code from these sources used by ResOrg includes:

• Office2K style File Dialogs by David Wulff
  
  
• MDI window tabs (COXTabWorkspace) by Dundas Software
  
  
• CModuleVersion by Paul D'Lascia (Microsoft Systems Journal)
  
  
• AutoRichEditCtrl by Jeremy Iverson
  
  
• CResizeCtrl by Herbert Menke
  
  
• XStatusBar by Joachim Raidl
  
  
• TcxMessageBox by Thales P. Carvalho
  
  
• CQArray by Martin Ziacek
  

Many thanks are also due to Oz Solomonovich for his excellent WndTabs add-in (which gave us the inspiration to get started on this in the first place) and Nick Hodapp (then the Visual C++ .NET Product Manager) for making the development of ResOrg.NET possible.