Graphically template a .NET winforms application

Question

I created a pretty fancy winforms app for my company. We had a graphic designer create the GUI, which was a pain to implement, all graphical buttons, lots of layered backgrounds and logos, animations, etc.

But now my company wants to resell it under different brands. But since I mostly coded it well, I told my higher ups I could have a totally rebranded version done in under a week. Basically all I would do is change a bunch of settings in an xml settings file, swap out the graphics with a new set, and build.

Problem is if they want 5 or 6 different brands, I'd have 5 different builds to support (I really should be supporting 1, with diff templates)

The problem is its not easy (as far as I know) to swap out the images in a winforms app. I have all the graphical resources in a single folder, but once each file is entered into its respective image list or container in visual studio, the only way to get it to update is to remove it and re-add it, changing the source folder doesnt cause the embedded image to refresh. This would be incredibly tedious for each build, there has got to be an easier way.

Add On:
So after some further investigation, I am leaning torwards some sort of resx file editor. However the ones I have seen so far are more focused on translating strings to various languages, and are either very weak, or can not at all edit binary resources like bitmaps/png's. Though if you open a resx file in an xml viewer (I use notepad 2 with .resx set to use xml sytax highlighting) MS is kind enough to tell you exactly how each type is compiled (mostly variations of base 64)

Answer 1

I think your goal should be having "brandable" resource files; you're essentially localizing your application, except you just have a few different versions of English.

You can use ResGen.exe and ResourceManager to load an external resources file, so you could use 5 different "resources" files but keep your code base the same.

This post may also help... http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/csharpgeneral/thread/b388c700-0e07-452b-a19e-ce02775f78a6/

Edit: BTW, I will second the comment that if you're going through a great deal of effort on this, consider WPF... Most of those "graphical" elements could possibly be done natively especially if it's gradients and stuff, not to mention the easy templating.