Copilot (in VS Code) helping me write posts is 🤯

In the era of source generators and .NET 6+, it would seem that adding a .resx file to your project should be enough to get you started with strongly-typed resources. I’d just expect some new source generator would pick .resx files (if they don’t have %(GenerateResource) metadata value set to false) and generate the corresponding code.

Despite years going by, this still doesn’t work as-is out of the box, which is quite annoying. I just spent a while figuring out why and found this excelent blog post on how to enable it. It’s almost there as a generic solution.

My solution for this is to add a Directory.Build.targets file to the root of my solution/repo with the following content:

<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
    <!-- For VSCode and .razor compat -->
    <CoreCompileDependsOn>PrepareResources;$(CoreCompileDependsOn)</CoreCompileDependsOn>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <ItemGroup>
    <EmbeddedResource Update="@(EmbeddedResource)">
      <Generator>MSBuild:Compile</Generator>
      <StronglyTypedFileName>$(IntermediateOutputPath)\$([MSBuild]::ValueOrDefault('%(RelativeDir)', '').Replace('\', '.').Replace('/', '.'))%(Filename).g$(DefaultLanguageSourceExtension)</StronglyTypedFileName>
      <StronglyTypedLanguage>$(Language)</StronglyTypedLanguage>
      <StronglyTypedNamespace Condition="'%(RelativeDir)' == ''">$(RootNamespace)</StronglyTypedNamespace>
      <StronglyTypedNamespace Condition="'%(RelativeDir)' != ''">$(RootNamespace).$([MSBuild]::ValueOrDefault('%(RelativeDir)', '').Replace('\', '.').Replace('/', '.').TrimEnd('.'))</StronglyTypedNamespace>
      <StronglyTypedClassName>%(Filename)</StronglyTypedClassName>
    </EmbeddedResource>
  </ItemGroup>
</Project>

Some notes:

1. The key is Generator=MSBuild:Compile, but that requires the other metadata items
2. The RelativeDir built-in metadata is used to generate the namespace and unique target file name. We cannot use it without replacing path separators with dots because the resgen tool will not create the directory structure for us.
3. The StronglyTypedLanguage is set to the current project $(Language) which should work for the supported languages by the resgen tool.

Enjoy!