Resources are used to manage windows and user defined objects . MS-Windows provides nine kinds of resources to application developers. These resources are icons, cursors, menus dialog boxes, fonts, bitmaps, char strings, user- defined resources, and keyboard acceleration.
- Icons and cursors: Windows define a few types of icons and cursors. An icon or a cursor is essentially a bit- mapped region that is used to represent and symbolize a window or cursor. A developer can also define an original icon or cursor using the ICONEDIT utility.
- Menus: Each window can have its own menu bar. A menu item can be a character string or a bitmap. Each item of a menu bar is in turn can have a pop-up menu presenting a list of option
- Dialog boxes: These provide another mechanism besides pop-up menu and menu bars to obtain information from the end –user. Dialog boxes are much more flexible than menu bars or pop-up menus. Dialog boxes usually contain group of child windows such as buttons, scroll bars, and editable fields. Just like windows, dialog boxes have a function that is used to process messages received from the user upon selection of options.
- Fonts: Windows provide a few families of font with different sizes and shapes: modem, roman, Swiss, Helvetica, and script. Application processors and desktop publishing can be defined additional fonts as needed.
- Bitmaps: They are used to represent icons, cursors, or draw picture on the screen. Both mono and colour bitmaps can be defined.
- Character strings: Character strings are handled as resources mainly to provide a manageable solution to internationalization of window application
- User defined resources: These can be used for any purpose and support any user defined data type. Any arbitrary data can be managed as a user- defined resource.