What are .rc2 files used for in Visual Studio

Question

I am new to Windows environment of development. I see a lot of .rc2 files used where a mapping is performed against some MACRO type constants to strings.

Q1. Why are these .rc2 files used?

Can someone give me a start on these.

Answer 1

Another important point besides Konamiman's answer is that the .rc file is automatically built from the Visual Studio graphical resource edior. Therefore if you want any manually editted resources they need to be placed in the .rc2 file.

Answer 2

From MSDN:

The RC2 file can be included at the top of the RC file in a project. An RC2 file is useful for including resources used by several different projects. Instead of having to create the same resources several times for different projects, you can put them in an RC2 file and include the RC2 file into the main RC file.