Free resource editor for Windows .rc files?

Question

Microsoft Visual C++ Express does not include the built-in resource editor that comes with the professional versions. Are there any good, free, alternatives out there that l

Answer 1

Microsoft eVC++4 (googlable, currently at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1DACDB3D-50D1-41B2-A107-FA75AE960856) is free, and comes with a built in resource editor. You can certainly create .rc (etc) files for MSVC++6 and onward (e.g., MSVC++2005e,2008e) with it. Using it to edit existing MSVC++6 (etc) files is not always as easy, as eVC is intended for Windows CE, which doesn't define all of the styles VC++6 uses (e.g., SS_SUNKEN), but you can always manually add them to your resource.h file (the appropriate values are searchable by looking in the .h's that come with MSVC++, and once you've done it once it should "just work".

Edit: I have found that it is better to just remove incompatible VC++6 styles (e.g., using a text editor), as some of the absent styles cause the window containing them to fail to display.