I’m currently working on a utility to improve upon the basic Error Lookup utility found in Microsoft Visual Studio. I am trying to improve it by collating all the error codes and messages found in the Microsoft Platform SDK into a database, which can be accessed and queried in a similar way to the existing utility, but with a extra bells and whistles (think free-text search, partial code matching, etc.). To make distribution of the utility easier, I decided to try embedding my error database into the executable file, which was straightforward. Using the database however required a bit more work, which I am presenting here in the hope that others will find it useful.