It can be seen that Presentation Manager provides the mechanism by which an application developer may externally define the user interface properties of his/her application. This ability provides the benefit that these external properties may be modified, or different versions substituted, without the need to modify the application code itself. In addition, standard user interface objects such as icons, pointers and dialog boxes, along with their associated dialog routines, may be defined and stored in dynamic link libraries for use by multiple applications.
Resources are defined using a resource script file, which is an ASCII text file containing definitions for text-based resources and references to other files that contain definitions for non-textual resources such as pointers and icons. The resource script file is used as input to the resource compiler, which compiles resource definitions and incorporates them into an executable module.
Resources may be incorporated into the application's main .EXE file, or may be stored in a dynamic link library and loaded into memory using run-time dynamic linking. Application procedures such as dialog procedures, which are associated with such resources, may also be defined and stored in the same DLL module, thus providing the opportunity to create libraries of standard resources, including standard dialogs, which may be used by multiple applications.