How to use resource files in D

[Koroskin Denis]

On Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:10:45 +0400, Jim Gadrow <makariverslund at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Ok, on to my next problem in my unceasing struggle to learn both D and  
> the Windows API at the same time.
>
> I've done a LOT of searching and cannot manage to find the correct  
> method of creating and using a resource in a windows program.
>
> What I would like to see is a minimal example of creating a 'hello  
> world' windows application with the strings replaced by string resources.
>
> Obviously, I have no idea how to import the symbol ID_HELLO into my  
> application. I've tried following one example I saw in one news group  
> that suggested replacing the symbol name with the id value and doing:
>
> const char* ID_HELLO = cast (char*) 1;
>
> But that resulted in an Access Violation.
>
> And declaring something like:
>
> extern (D)
> const char* ID_HELLO;
>
> resulted in a message box with an empty message. I've never dealt with  
> resource files before, so this is all new to me. It would probably be  
> nice to have a sample available with all the others that shows the  
> proper way of handling resources.
>
> I had the following in my .rc file (It's probably wrong...)
> #define ID_HELLO 1
>
> STRINGTABLE
> BEGIN
> 	ID_HELLO	"Hello World!"
> END
>
> And this is my program:
> import std.c.windows.windows;
> extern (C)
> {
> 	void gc_init ();
> 	void gc_term ();
> 	void _minit ();
> 	void _moduleCtor ();
> 	void _moduleDtor ();
> 	void _moduleUnitTests ();
> }
>
> extern (Windows)
> int WinMain (HINSTANCE hInst, HINSTANCE hPrev, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int  
> nCmdShow)
> {
> 	int result;
> 	
> 	gc_init ();
> 	_minit ();
> 	
> 	try
> 	{
> 		_moduleCtor ();
> 		_moduleUnitTests ();
> 		
> 		result = myWinMain (hInst, hPrev, lpCmdLine, nCmdShow);
> 		
> 		_moduleDtor ();
> 	}
> 	catch (Object o)
> 	{
> 		MessageBoxA (null, cast (char*) o.toString (), "Error", MB_OK |  
> MB_ICONEXCLAMATION);
> 		result = 0;
> 	}
> 	
> 	gc_term ();
> 	return result;
> }
>
> int myWinMain (HINSTANCE hInst, HINSTANCE hPrev, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int  
> nCmdShow)
> {
> 	MessageBoxA (null, ID_HELLO, "Hello world example ", MB_OK);
> 	return 0;
> }

Just looked at the DFL implementation. rctest example has the rctest.res  
and rctest.rc file of the following contents:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // beginning of the file
101 ICON DISCARDABLE "tray.ico"

"mspaint" BITMAP DISCARDABLE "rctest.bmp"

STRINGTABLE DISCARDABLE
BEGIN
	3001 "This string was loaded from the resource!"
END
~~~~~~~~~~~~~ // end of file

These can be generated with Visual Studio, for example.
Command line looks like this:
dmd.exe somefile.d somefile.res

There are also a few functions to retrieve resources from executable:
Use LoadIcon, LoadImage, FindResourceEx and LoadResource methods to  
extract data from those .res files.

For code snippets take a look into dfl.resources module (getIcon,  
getString etc)
DFL can be downloaded from www.dprogramming.com/dfl.php

Hope you find this useful.