.NET has that awesome ability to embed files into .NET assemblies and extract them at runtime. 2005 made it even easier with the application framework and the my namespace.

however what I am looking to do is the opposite. Keep an external resource file with images, icons, etc. in it, and access it at runtime.

Reason being my exe would be about half as large without all the images embedded into it, and that would help for when updates are downloaded from the web, as the images never change.

So while there are a million articles on doing it via an embedded file, I haven't come across any that show you how to load an external resource file and use it.

I bumped into an article that talks about using Satellite Assemblies. This may be something I can use, but they seem to be more for localizing your app for different languages. I don't need that, but if it can simply store images that I can retrieve later then I am fine using that.

Also having the files just sit in the app directory is NOT what I am looking for, its either external resource file or nothing...