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C3, WPF, Windows 7, Microsoft Ribbon, Visual studio 2010, dotnet 4.5

I would like to write the help files in html and include them inside the .exe file as an resource.

Is there a way of telling the explorer to get the html pages directly from the .exe file ?

If not, I assume the only way to archive it is to create a temporary directory, copy the files and start the browser pointing to these files.

Is there a magic call that takes a resource directory and unpack/copy it to a directory ?

Like

tempDir = GetTempDirectory();
WPF_MAGIC_RESOURCE_UNPACKER("/help/*", tempDir );
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(tempDir + Path.DirectorySeparatorChar + "index.html");

Regards Stefan

Preet Sangha
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Stefan Olsson
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  • Why you want help to be merged into your binary?? Help usualy ocupies non insignificant amount of space and people usually never read help, so why pump your binary with data which probabbly will be never used? Put it into separate folder. – Tigran Aug 23 '11 at 08:34
  • Yes, that is another solution but I want the .exe file to be "failsafe", that is, they can copy it "around" but still everything will work. – Stefan Olsson Aug 23 '11 at 08:53

1 Answers1

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I agree with @Tigran, these should be stored separate to the binary or even online, but if you feel as though this is the best solution you could probably make use of the Pack URI functionality of WPF.

This is primarily used for images such as icon resources and splash screens, but could be used for any type of content.

You should be able to extract these resources and save them to the file system or to a stream and use as you see fit.

Example: Uri absoluteUri = new Uri("pack://application:,,,/help/contents.htm", UriKind.Absolute);

fatty
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