Manage Application Branding in Visual Studio 2010

Question

I have inherited a C# .Net 3.5 project whose design and implementation was contracted out and now I have to support design changes. I am newish to C# and .Net development (I am a firmware engineer by trade.)

I have been given the requirement to support 3 different branding looks for the application. A branding look consists of a different GIF icon on the main form logo, different application icon and some tables stored in a DLL. I do not need to switch brands at run time just at build time.

My question is how to go about this? Can resources be used to support this?

Answer 1

You can make use of custom cultures to support brand specific resources. I am uncertain if this is the best way to accomplish branding in .NET but so far it's the only implementation I encountered.

Custom cultures work just like language specific resource files. You can create "en-US-BrandA" resource file and have your application load from it.

More info on how to implement custom cultures can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172469.aspx

Please do let me know if you found a different way to accomplish application branding.