How do you set Resource Logical Name in Visual Studio 2010?

Question

I have a problem when migrating a solution from VS2008 to VS2010. The problem is that the managed resources are not found in some cases in runtime, since they are not embedded with the correct name:

"Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture. Make sure "Production.ViewDocument.resources" was correctly embedded or linked into assembly "RSProcess" at compile time, or that all the satellite assemblies required are loadable and fully signed."

System.Resources.MissingManifestResourceException is typically thrown InitializeComponent in a call to ApplyResources on a resource that is created passing the type id. In my case the namespace is Production and the class name is ViewDocument. However, the resource generated (from the ViewDocument.resx) is named from the folder structure where the resx file is, in this case Production.folder1.folder2.ViewDocument.resources.

In VS2008 you could override the (default) logical name in in a setting on the .resx file, Managed Resources/General/Resource Logical Name. In VS2010 I cannot get this to work - it simply ignores this setting completly! Is there any ohter way of solving this?

One last resort would be to remove the current folder structure and move all files to the root project folder, but this seems to be quite a lot of work in my case.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I have found an answer to my own question!

A couple of things has changed in VS2010 that confused me. First, in VS2008 the names of the .resource files were affected by the project setting 'Resource Logical Name', in VS2010 the files are always named according to the root namespace of the project and the folder structure (extended namespace). Second, when migrating, these settings were blanked out, perhaps because we had used a macro $(InputFile) that has been replaced by %(Filename).

To fix this problem, I defined 'Resource Logical Name' on the project level (or you could use project property pages) to $(RootNamespace).%(Filename).resources. Note that the .resource files still get the extended names (defined by in which folder they reside). However, if you check the log file from MSBuild you can see that the logical name appears in the /ASSEMBLYRESOURCE swich to the linker in addition to the resource file name! After rebuilding, the ComponentResourceManager will now find the resources in 'InitializeComponent' using the type for the view, Rootnamespace.filename in this case. Also note that this assumes that your view classes are placed in files with the same name as the class!