Did you check out Junichiro’s tutorial ?
Is this what you mean ?
The act of adding a resource might be simple (although not in my personal experience), but the deluge of files and bouncing references around that goes on behind the scene is intimidating.
Its a slightly different way but basicly the same. You can add a resource item the same way you add a new class file etc. Then you can just reference it from the code.
And in six weeks you will say to yourself: “How easy it was” 
Just to muddy the waters, I’ve never been a big fan of the automatic resources system and instead directly create a bitmap from an embedded resource
Yeah, but now @stevebaer , we’re gonna lose @osuire .
Me too. I rarely use automatic resources.
@stevebaer Thanks for this, I had a similar issue using Rider. I was following @LongNguyen recorded workshop. This is what ended up working for me:
Make sure the 24x24 icon is an ‘Embedded Resource’
Use a stream, but with the EndsWith recommendation found on this Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/62808651/1026169
Here is the code that finally worked from the .cs file:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Runtime.Versioning;
using Grasshopper;
using Grasshopper.Kernel;
using Rhino.Geometry;
namespace Plugin_1_Day_3
{
public class Averages : GH_Component
{
/// <summary>
/// Each implementation of GH_Component must provide a public
/// constructor without any arguments.
/// Category represents the Tab in which the component will appear,
/// Subcategory the panel. If you use non-existing tab or panel names,
/// new tabs/panels will automatically be created.
/// </summary>
public Averages()
: base("Averages", "Computes Averages",
"Workshop Test Component - Averages",
"Workshop", "Utilities")
{
}
/// <summary>
/// Registers all the input parameters for this component.
/// </summary>
protected override void RegisterInputParams(GH_Component.GH_InputParamManager pManager)
{
pManager.AddNumberParameter("first num", "first", "the first num", GH_ParamAccess.item, 0.0);
pManager.AddNumberParameter("second num", "second", "the second num", GH_ParamAccess.item, 0.0);
}
/// <summary>
/// Registers all the output parameters for this component.
/// </summary>
protected override void RegisterOutputParams(GH_Component.GH_OutputParamManager pManager)
{
pManager.AddNumberParameter("Average", "Average", "average of inputs", GH_ParamAccess.item);
}
/// <summary>
/// This is the method that actually does the work.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="DA">The DA object can be used to retrieve data from input parameters and
/// to store data in output parameters.</param>
protected override void SolveInstance(IGH_DataAccess DA)
{
var nums = new List<double>();
double a = double.NaN;
double b = double.NaN;
nums.Add(a);
nums.Add(b);
DA.GetData(0, ref a);
DA.GetData(1, ref b);
double average = 0.5 * (a + b);
DA.SetData(0, average);
}
/// <summary>
/// Provides an Icon for every component that will be visible in the User Interface.
/// Icons need to be 24x24 pixels.
/// You can add image files to your project resources and access them like this:
/// return Resources.IconForThisComponent;
/// </summary>
//protected override System.Drawing.Bitmap Icon => null;
protected override System.Drawing.Bitmap Icon
{
get
{
var assembly = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
{
var resourceName = assembly.GetManifestResourceNames().Single(n => n.EndsWith("icon.png"));
var stream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(resourceName);
if (stream != null) return new Bitmap(stream);
}
return null;
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Each component must have a unique Guid to identify it.
/// It is vital this Guid doesn't change otherwise old ghx files
/// that use the old ID will partially fail during loading.
/// </summary>
public override Guid ComponentGuid => new Guid("6CBE441F-4367-4146-9755-BF7296D4BFE1");
}
}
Here’s how it turned out:
Also, kinda unrelated, but making a big difference for me with this kinda stuff. This plugin makes learning to write C# plugins so much less tedious:
On the component it works, thanks. And above?
You can create a new component using existing template and compare it with your code, or post your project to get help from the developers
For those who might benefit from a visual explanation over a written one, I have found this video quite helpful for when I was first learning how to add icons.
5.5 Adding Icons to Your Plug-in! - Advanced Development in Grasshopper - YouTube
As well, @stevebaer I really like that method of auto compiling from the icon folder. I just might pick it up.
Hello, it seems like the way of adding resources has now changed and I cannot get it to work.
When I go to Properties>Resources I no longer get the page to add resources, but a warning that this has changed and a link to the new location to do this.
when I go there I add the resource by pressing the green + button:
but then when I try to add the icon in the code (using the same name):
thanks in advance!
I typically use a different route for embedding my icons in GHAs. I use the syntax as shown here for telling a project to embed all pngs from a certain directory
I then access these resources from code with the following syntax
You can check the discussion here:
There’s a new approach for adding icons now.
Here is a project that use this approach lively:
Some good news! Visual Studio 2022 version 17.14.0 has now fixed the issue adding images to .resx files using the default (new) resource editor.
thats great thank you! this way worked well, maybe it could be added to the creating a plugin documentation? seeing this before would have saved me a lot of headaches
