When i first
started to develop .NET applications i had already used Win32 resources,
and i was aware of the importance of using resource files in applications
(using resource files keeps your output text away from code and avoids
external files used by your program to fill a folder and your hard disk
with tons of files. Resource files provides a great deployment and distribution
solution).
Then after reading a lot about the .NET platform and specially about the
brand new .NET resource files, i started to code a bit but when resources
were needed i wanted to create these files but didn't know how. I searched
the net for tools and noticed that there were GUI resource editors
but almost none for automated console work, so i then decided to create
ResMagik. Microsoft .NET SDK comes with 2 tools for manipulating resources
but none of them accomplish ResMagik's goal.
I coded ResMagik in august 2005 (in a dual Intel Pentium III Katmai
machine) as a support tool for developing
applications in .NET framework v1.1.
I have always created programs manually or also known as 'by hand', this
means, using Notepad as the IDE and compiling with a batch file.
This programming method gives full control over your code and the program
creation process. With that in mind i designed ResMagik as a command line
tool, no pretty GUI, just fast I/O through system console.
A very common task can be easily done many times, such as code compilation.
Calling ResMagik through a batch file can create resources files every
time you want to compile your application.
One day i noticed that ResMagik was very useful and it was a must have
tool for all my projects so i then though: "ResMagik is very useful to me
but it's very lonely in my hard disk, maybe it could be useful for someone
else too. ResMagik goes open source!".
About the future:
Time has past since the born of ResMagik
and many things have evolved. It's time to give ResMagik a new path, so
i've decided to recode ResMagik entirely giving it new features,
.NET framework 2.0 migration and a solid/reliable base code for the
open source comunity.
The original ResMagik was only able to compile resources, not extract them.
The first release i want it to be like the original ResMagik: Compile only.
Then in the next release i'll add extraction capability and resource
regionalization. Maybe in a future release i'll migrate ResMagik to native
code making it frameworkless, it will interact with resource files
directly (binary access). It may manipulate Win32 resource files as well.
It will surely work with .resx files and it will feature strong type
resources, ImageLists, serializable objects and many more.
With each release of ResMagik there will be 2 packages: The binaries and
the source code.
About me:
I'm Heinz Traub. I did my first program in an Atari 800XE when i was 9 years old
but started intensive programming when i was 15 in a 486 machine. I
specialize in assemblies and binary files programming (and enjoy doing so).
I have great experience implementing resource files (Win32, .NET &
propietary file formats). I have created a propietary resource file format
(commercial project) that exceeds in features and functionality to all
resource packager files i've worked with. I want
to trust people who trust in my software. That's all you need to know
about me.
