Resourcefulness

How cool is Visual Studio 2005's handling of resources? FxCop picks you up on it if you're daft enough to use a string literal, and VS2005 itself offers to autogenerate a class that exposes the strings to code as properties. Combined with the great handling of internationalised resources, this promises to make our lives a lot easier.

Previously, creating and consuming resources in an internationalisable way has been - maybe not difficult, but definitely a bit painful and a lot of work.

Today, I created a handful of new resources and a couple of new resource files in side projects, including appropriate accessor classes in under ten minutes. I also scrapped our own pre-existing classes for doing the same job. They were good enough, but not quite as flexible as the autogenerated classes can be.

It's always satisfying to be able to reduce the amount of code we directly write and maintain.