Deployment of Data with an executable in a single file?

I’d like to distribute a single file which:

1) Contains a Visual Basic executable.

2) Also contains 0.5 – 5 megabytes of data.

3) When its icon is double-clicked in Windows Explorer, executes the Visual Basic executable, and permits that executable to read and write to the data contained in the distributed file.

How might that be done with or without third-party tools?

Added after Franz C's reply:

Resource files hold 64K maximum. What I'm asking for isn't wierd or unreasonable, but very much like a self-extracting zip archive. How would one construct a self-extracting zip archive in Visual Basic?

John Fritch

[Edited by John Fritch on 08-24-2000 at 04:36 PM]

I you only wanted to read the data, you could use a resource file for this. However, this could slow your executable down. I don't know of a way to edit an executable while it is being used. I would recommend to put the data in a seperate file.