Today I was looking for a tool that would generate wrappers for existing resx files (if you are wondering, yes VS 2005 has corrupted me). I did a bit of googling around and found ResxWrap on SourceForge. Actually I found Codify templates first, but that was a bit too beefy for my requirement.
ResxWrap is a simple console app that will parse your resx file and generate a c-sharp wrapper. The downside is that it creates ‘string’ properties for all your resource values no matter what type they are. Its still a neat tool though, but can do with a lot of polishing up, even a GUI.
VS Tip: If you want to generate a wrapper in VS2005 for an existing resx file, just open up the properties window for the resx and add the “ResXFileCodeGenerator” as a custom tool. That would generate the wrapper class for you. Only shortcoming of this approach is the wrapper OOB will only work with .NET 2.0, which leaves a lot of work for you, if you want to be able to use it across runtime versions..