Importing a resource from one MFC project to another

God only knows how I hate MFC. When I first came across it I was already a sort of a veteran at C# and .Net and had quite a bit of experience developing front ends using these technologies. My first impression on MFC was "Maaaaaan!!! this feels AAAAAnnnnnnncient". Yep... But since it was the platform being used at our company I had to learn to live with it...

So, it happens that I'm developing a front-ends for a product(I'm mainly a back end developer :)) and it has to be customized for different projects. Recently, I made an enhancement in one project and now I have to do almost the exact same thing for another one. Importing the controls from the original project seemed like the obvious solution.


It was a surprise to see how easy it was to do this in VS6. The steps are;

* In VC6, pick "Open" from the File menu.
* At the very bottom of the open file dialog is a combo box labeled
"open as", which says "Auto" by default.
* Change that so it says "Resources" instead.
* Locate the resource file, select it, and hit open
* Drag and drop the required control from the main window to your resource view.

These steps were adequate for me to get the control integrated with all the control IDs properly assigned. But sometimes the IDs might get reset to some meaningless numeric values. In that case, those would have to be renamed manually by going to the "Properties" of each control.

(Thanks to Katy Mulvey who provided this excellent guide down at the devX forum. Link)