I am new to C++ but I do have a lot of .NET experience. I need to port an existing VB.NET application to native code because one of my production machines does not have the .NET framework installed. Unfortunately .NET can not be installed on this particular machine due to other restrictions.

The current program creates a directory, extracts some embedded resources to that directory and then runs one of the extracted files on a periodic basis. The problem that I am having now is how do I create an embedded resource and then access it in C++? I am currently using Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 with CLR turned off. Any help would be appreciated as I have already searched Google for hours and came up with nothing.

I'm not that good with C++ either. But one tool you can try, Xenocode Postbuilt. It can embed .Net Framework into the exe, so the target machine doesn't need to have .net installed. Maybe you can try that, then you won't need to port it to C++, which might double the work, and double the bugs as well. I've been using Xenocode to obfuscate my .net assembly, but never got a chance to use the embedded framework though, cause it require .net v2.0, but i'm mainly still using v1.1. I see that you're using VS2005, so most likely you're using .net v2.0, so you can give it a shot.

http://www.xenocode.com/Products/Postbuild/Features.aspx

Thanks but the requirement is not to have .NET on the target machine at all.

You have the same issue as i had when i started using VS 2003.
There are two ways:
1. Convert your whole code to .net-independent code (hard, but it's worth it).
2. Embed the framework IN your app: i dont really recommend this, because the .net wont act as a framework anymore, but instead it will all be loaded at once into the memory, resulting in an inefficient app. And btw, the framework is - as far as i know - like 100mb, good luck with that!