How to programmatically access an Add-ins image?

Question

From this thread:

Can you programmatically change the button image for a ESRI.ArcGIS.Desktop.AddIns.Button?

I've learned to change a command image programmatically, but... how can I programmatically get an image from the "Images" folder of the Addins, avoiding to write the physical file path?

Is there a way to quickly get access to the Addins resources?

Answer 1

I guess it depends on what you mean by "quickly". The images are unpacked into the AssemblyCache under the user's profile.

Win7 example:
AppData\Local\ESRI\Desktop10.0\AssemblyCache\{3E0AB950-82E4-BF00-EA51-9FC591749394}\Images

I get the directory with something like this:

string dirpath =    Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location),"Images")

And then you can use normal .NET file IO to access the files. And these would be the files in visual studio that have a build action of AddInContent.

You can also add files with a build action as Embedded Resource and get it with GetManifestResourceStream:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/278838/visual-studio-how-to-store-an-image-resource-as-an-embedded-resource/483891#483891

There might be other methods, but the two above are what I've used (I guess 3 of you count resources).