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Charles Cook wrote about the new precompilation features of Whidbey and also mentioned GAD's new article, “New Code Compilation Features in ASP.NET Whidbey”

For those looking to distribute ASP.NET applications this is a much needed new feature. Along with this, the new Web Resource feature which allows you to easy add and reference items such as images and CSS files directly from compiled assemblies.

To use Web Resource, you add something like this (usually in your assembly.cs file)
[assembly: WebResource(“Smile.gif”, “image/gif”)]

Then, when you need to retrieve this item use  Page.GetWebResourceUrl which will return (and cache) a url to your web resource. The caching takes advantage of LastModifiedDate file attributes so that on future requests, the item might not have to be reserved from IIS. In addition, the resource url includes a date querystring parameter so that it will be get updated as you make changes to your assembly.

For more info on WebResource, check out Nikhil Kothari's excellent PDC presentation.