Visual Studio C++ Resource File gets altered after changing Dialog - c++

Question

I have a weird problem with my .rc file in my project.
I have set some variables to show the versionnumber in my dialogs.
BEGIN
VALUE "CompanyName", "Big company"
VALUE "FileDescription", "nice software"
VALUE "FileVersion", VERSION_NUMBER
VALUE "InternalName", "some name"
VALUE "LegalCopyright", "some more strings"
VALUE "OriginalFilename", "some.exe"
VALUE "ProductName", "some name"
VALUE "ProductVersion", VERSION_NUMBER
END
The problem is that when I alter any dialog in Visual Studio, even just moving a button, is does also change the variables. In this case: VERSION_NUMBER to "004.005.0.0". Which is not bad, I mean at compiletime it should eventually get filled with the correct data as defined in a header:
#define MAJOR 004
#define MINOR 005
#define RELEASE 0
#define BUILD 0
#define VERSION_NUMBER STRINGIFY(MAJOR) "." STRINGIFY(MINOR) "." STRINGIFY(RELEASE) "." STRINGIFY(BUILD)
#define VERSION_NUMBER_DWORD MAJOR,MINOR,RELEASE,BUILD
#endif
But not while I am editing a dialog.
Right now we have a powershell script on the build server which searches for those strings and resets them before it compiles but it is not the most elegant solution. Is there any way to tell Visual Studio to stop changing those vars before compile time?

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comment to the original post, The typical method would be to add lines to the rc2 file.
As an alternate option, you can use the TEXTINCLUDE sections to add read-only defines and include additional header files. These sections are used by the editor when rebuilding the file.
2 TEXTINCLUDE DISCARDABLE
BEGIN
"#ifndef APSTUDIO_INVOKED\r\n"
"#include ""targetver.h""\r\n"
"#endif\r\n"
"#include ""afxres.h""\r\n"
"#include ""verrsrc.h""\r\n"
"#define MAJOR 004\r\n"
"#define MINOR 005\r\n"
"#define RELEASE 0\r\n"
"#define BUILD 0\r\n"
"#define VERSION_NUMBER STRINGIFY(MAJOR) ""."" STRINGIFY(MINOR) ""."" STRINGIFY(RELEASE) ""."" STRINGIFY(BUILD)\r\n"
"#define VERSION_NUMBER_DWORD MAJOR,MINOR,RELEASE,BUILD\r\n"
"\0"
END
Microsoft: How Visual C++ Manages Set Includes Information