Once added, check the Properties of your images to ensure they have a Build Action of 'Resource' (they should be by default -- at least that is the behavior I get with Visual Studio 2008). Now when you build your project they will be compiled directly into the executable. Referencing the embedded resources to create WPF images is simple. So, text in the UI will use strings from resource files. This will make it easy to internationalize the program. These are the steps to bind a value from a resource file to a property of a WPF window. Create the resource file. I created a "Resources" folder, in the WPF project, to hold all the resources files. Resx files vs. resources files The question now, is why there are two different formats, I mean, resx and resource format or extension to represent the same kind of files, namely, the resource files. And why, for each time, that I use the resx format file, I encounter problems to embed it in a run time executable environment. To demonstrate a solution, I have created several resource files (resx) that contain currently text only. I want to read the resx files for all languages under WPF .NET 3.5 to get out information that I have added to it, in order not to hard-code. The File class seems to be useful for reading it, but it is inconvenient to go through the XML Preparing your strings for localization. If you are going to have a string in your WPF application, it is a good idea to store those strings in a centralized place for localization purposes. Usually in Visual Studio, that is in Resources.resx. Often a string is entered directly into an the WPF XAML. This is not recommended. This enables you to point to the source file, i.e. the ResourceDictionary named Dictionary1.xaml in the Resource project. The way you point to that resource is to create a ResourceDictionary in the Application.xaml file of the client project, the project that I named ResourceUser. You set its Source property to the Dictionary1.xaml file