Ever poked around in a directory like “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\”? Maybe you were looking examining one of the core features, like BaseSite, that came with WSS for a clue in your feature development. If you look open the feature.xml file in BaseSite, or other feature.xml files in the FEATURES directory structure, you see $Resources references like this:

Reading “Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0” today, I finally made sense of those strings. They refer to entries in resource files, with .resx extensions in the Resources folder of the WSS Root Directory. So $Resources:osrvcore,BaseFeatureDescription refers to the BaseFeatureDescription text in the osrvcore.resx file in the Resource directory.

Want to read more?

Bjørn Furuknap, of recent SharePoint 2010 controversy, also has a detailed explanation of what’s going on behind the scenes in SharePoint Resource Files for CAML.

Questions

Do you find this as hard to understand as I do? I have never seen this documented anywhere else. Am I just crazy?