ASP.NET 5 - Embedding Resources

ASP.NET 5 has now been released as a final release candidate. As such, it's only right to start playing with things (if you haven't already, go check out www.asp.net/vNext)

The structure of projects has changed greatly in the new version and the documentation so far is lacking a bit so figuring out some of the most straightforward processes takes time.

So to make things easier, I'm going to blog about some of the most...  time consuming changes. Most of them are pretty straightforward once you know how it all works but it's getting to that stage that I want to help with.

First up... how to embed resources into a DLL.

Embedding Resources

Pre version 5, you could go to the Properties of a file and select the Build Action to "Embedded Resource". See below.

This will then modify the .csproj file, specifying that the file in question is embedded in to the DLL.

ASP.NET v5 doesn't have a .csproj file. Instead, it uses the project.json file so we need to modify this accordingly.

There's a "resource" property on the json config object. This takes an array of strings which represents a glob pattern for matching files.

As an example, for a file structure looking like this...

- Dependencies
- Controllers
- Views
- Resources
       - Files
             - Embedded.txt

You'd have a project.json file that looks like this...

---

...

"frameworks": {
    "dnx451": { },
    "dnxcore50": { }
},

...

"resource": [ "Resources/Files/*.txt" ]

...

---

That would embed all .txt files found under the Resources/Files directory. Build the project and hey presto. You've embedded your file into the DLL.

Once you've embedded the file, you probably want to read it. And that's changed too!

Reading Embedded Resources

Pre version 5, a familiar structure for reading an embedded resource would be:

---

var assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
var resourceName = "EmbedResource.Resources.Files.Embedded.txt";

using(Stream stream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(resourceName)){
    using(StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream)){
        string result = reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

---

However, in version 5, Assembly does not have a GetExecutingAssembly() method. Nor, does the Type class have an Assembly property so getting hold of the required assembly object proves rather difficult. But, with the help of the GetTypeInfo extension method on the Type object, version 5 has a solution.

Below is code to achieve the same thing as above but in version 5...

---

var assembly = this.GetType().GetTypeInfo().Assembly;
var resourceName = "EmbedResource.Resources.Files.Embedded.txt";

using (Stream stream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(resourceName)){
    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream)){
        string result = reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

---

And that's that. As I said... nothing difficult. Just a case of knowing the differences between the frameworks.