It is very common to use resource files in .Net applications when you need to store some data in a XML file. I usually use .resx files as string tables in order to avoid hard coded strings in my code. Two months ago, we published a post about a free tool which helps to extract hard coded strings to resource files. Notice that when you add a resource file, there is an automatically generated class with properties issued from the resources elements, so you can call this class properties instead of using the ResourceManager. The only problem with this class is that its properties are marked as internal and thus can’t be accessed externally (from other assemblies).