Search

There are plenty of articles on the web detailing how to localize strings within Silverlight applications, however, one area of confusion seems to be how to get Silverlight to accept text input using the users current culture settings.

For example, if I type 10,1 in a locale that uses the ‘,’ symbol as the decimal symbol I might expect to get the decimal number “10.1” (UK Format), however, I will in fact receive the number 101.

To continue our series, let’s look at localizing our business applications.  In today’s global village, it is often no longer OK to support only one language.   Many real world business applications need to support multiple languages.  

One of the announcements that happened during the MIX10 conference was the availability of the V2 of the Microsoft Translator API.  This is the engine that powers the translation behind http://www.bing.com/translate and some other Bing-related properties as well.  A lot of research has gone into the engine from Microsoft Research and others.  Language translation isn’t an easy task especially taking into consideration cultural significance of words, etc. 

Although it looks that localization of Silverlight Business Applications is not worth of writing a post, there are some really inconspicuous problems which you have to resolve.

Is beta 2 api complete regarding xaml, or will there be changes for rtm? You mention featuers like "BamlReaderAsText" and "BamlWriter", which I can't find in the beta 2 release.

RR: The API is mostly complete.  There aren’t major changes post-Beta2.

BamlWriter is not shipping in .NET 4. BamlReader as text is Baml2006Reader created with Baml2006ReaderSettings.ValuesMustBeString… we affectionately call this “BRAT” mode.  We have 1 major BRAT bug that we are still attempting to fix before we ship…

Here I already explained how to create the RESX files for Silverlight (by the way the article is relevant also for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 & Silverlight 3), and how to use those resources from XAML. In some cases, though, it is needed to use those resources from code behind. In my scenario I had to create value converter, which converts some Boolean value to string representation and for localizes application I had to provide localized value.

In order to use resources from code behind one need to get instance of ResourceManager class, and the use its methods to get the resource by name for any supported culture.

As a best practice for String resource localization, in your Silverlight application structure, organize your resource files accordingly.  We’re going to use the RESX file approach and let the framework do most of the work for us.  To that regard in my application I have created a folder called Resources and will be placing my RESX files there.  I’ll first add the default set of data, adding a new RESX file named Strings.resx.

Localization and internationalization have never been great in Silverlight, but are totally possible and kind of easy with a bit of manual work.

There are a lot of articles out there focused on localization so I won’t dig deep in that. Instead, I want to make a note about the generated code for the resources and especially the nasty internal constructor.

Last week Jeff Handley wrote an article about the ViewModel Pattern and this week he continues the topic with two more articles - HelloWorld.ViewModel and Binding Converters - VisibilityConverter.

Mike Taulty starts the week with a great article about localization and globalization in Silverlight 2.

The guys from the "Expression Blend and Design" blog provides with some tips of how to simulate sample data in Expression Blend while designing.

Also don't miss Mike Snows and his Tip of the day #66 - How to copy XAML for Silverlight from Expression Designer.

Alex Knight posted a nice tutorial about skinning a button with Expression Blend.

Here is one post about Windows Azure Service Platform by Gill Cleeren. It seems that we can expect a lot from it!

John Papa discuss how Netflix has announced it will use Silverlight to stream movies to the Mac in his post called "An Also Ran?".

Corey Schuman talks about the AOL's Silverlight mail server.

At the blog of DevExpress you can see a cool preview of their Silverlight controls - AgDataGrid, AgMenu Suite, AgNavBar control, AgLayoutControl Library and AgRichTextEdit control. Some of them are already released and some are to be released, but all of them look really nice and I'm really impatient to see the new ones in action!

Don't hesitate to check out the site Walt Ritscher made in Silverlight for presenting his Shazzam tool. It's a WPF Pixel Shader effect tool and, as Walt wrote, its source code will be soon available on CodePlex. In this post you can find additional info about it.\

Gerard Leblanc posted the second article of his series about Menus in Silverlight. The topic is multi-level drop down menu and if you missed the first part better check it out here.

And last but not least for today - Dan Wahlin and his article about Adding Style to Silverlight 2 Controls.