It was a very annoying problem with sharing icons between projects.
The solution described here is how to share icons between projects using Visual Studio in correct way. Lets start step-by-step!
1. The correct way in sharing some resources consist in creation of the global shared project. Create new Project with name Resources;
2. Next we must add some resource (e.g some icons) to the project. Do this as usual. Go to the projects setting. Select tab Resources and Add Existing File... to the project. We can see that icon is added to the project and was copied to the local folder;
3. Next step consists of adding this icons to the other project. But one important think! You must add this icon as link. In this case we avoid the resource duplication. OK. Create new Project is same solution and name it for example Main. Create some folder in your other project. For example we can name it as Resource. (Logical name for our purpose). Then right click at this folder. Select Add Existing Item... and choose our image from shared project. Do not forget to add this file as link. Well, you see that just added file can a little differ icon;
Added image must looks like this
4. Now we must set Build Action for this file to None. For this select the file and go to the Properties Window. There choose None for Build Action. We need to do this to avoid the embedding this icon to the Assembly;
5. Well, we must to perform last step to complete task. Open Project Settings for project where we just adds the icon. Choose the Resource tab and drag linked image to the resources.
Yep! These five simple steps you must perform to share some icons between projects. But you can ask "What is the benefits of this?" There are:
- All resources are located in one place;
- Resources are not grabbed by projects locally. It means you can substitute some icons is Shared project and they will automatically be caught in all paced where they used;
- If you share large files, you save the size of your App;
- In case if you share icons between project you can use this icons in designer mode.
