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Usually when we think of internationalization we think of the text that appears on the screen. However, it is important that you also think about dates, and perhaps images as well.

Dates

In the U.S. we get used to thinking of dates in terms of month, day and year, in that order. There are different ways of representing these (month name vs. number, 2 vs. 4-digit year, etc.) but it is important to recognize the fact that dates are not always represented the same way in other countries. For example, in England the day comes first and the month comes second.

As mentioned in the What is a .resx file and how should I us it? post, when you create a .resx file a corresponding .cs (or .vb) file/class is code-generated, and this class gives you strongly-typed access to resources. This can be used in declarative databinding or in code. One important thing to understand however is that if you create a .resx file called MyStrings.resx, behind the scenes a class is created called MyStrings. So make sure when you name your .resx files that you don’t use a name that you have used for another class in your project!

Naming conventions for .resx keys

From what I’ve read, Microsoft’s recommendation for .resx keys is Pascal-case.

It’s about time for a step by step walkthrough of the internationalization process. For this example, I will use my preferred approach, MVVM. Note that most of the steps would be the same for other internationalization methods that I outlined in my previous post, Implementation Options.

Scenario

In this example we will pretend that we are tasked with building an application whose requirements state that the default language will be English, but that users will also be accessing it from the U.K. and Germany.

Note that this example is build with VisualStudio Beta 2 targeting Silverlight 4.

Most developers would prefer to hear that “this is the right way to do Internationalization”, but as with just about anything in the software development world, there are several different ways to do it. The standard response to the “what is the right way?” question is “it depends”. None of these methods are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but they do each have their pros and cons. Here are just some of the options:

Method 1 - Microsoft Silverlight Business Application

You may want to create a new project in VisualStudio using this template just to see how it’s done.

A .resx file is a place where application developers can store resources that are used in their apps. By resources I mean things like text and images that appear in the UI.

Resources – An overloaded term

Resources can mean several things to a developer, especially in Silverlight. Several years ago when I would have a Resources directory in my ASP.NET app, and it would have subdirectories for my Images, CSS files and JavaScript files.

In a Silverlight project there are no CSS or JavaScript files (though there may be JavaScript files in the Web project), but you may still want subdirectories for Images and Styles (XAML files that provide custom style information).

I highly recommend that all .NET applications leverage Microsoft’s internationalization framework, regardless of whether or not there is a current business requirement for it. The main reasons are:

• It is not all that difficult or time consuming to set an application up for internationalization at the onset of development.
• It is much more difficult to internationalize an app after the fact, and no fun hunting through thousands of lines of code for every bit of text that appears on the screen. It is also not fun having to revisit the code every time QA finds a string that was missed…it is basically a testing and bug fixing nightmare.

As mentioned in my first post I will use the term internationalization throughout this post in reference to the ability to present an application in multiple languages.

Technically I should use the term globalization, and often you will also see another term floating around, localization. These terms each have their own distinct meaning. The definition of each term and the reason for the terminology confusion is outlined on page 33 of this document (it’s actually page 5 of 34 in the PDF):

http://www.dotneti18n.com/Downloads/Chapter3.pdf

Abbreviations

You may often come across abbreviations like I18N and L10N.

Download the source code

This is the first in a series of blog posts around the topic of internationalization in Silverlight. Many of today’s LOB (line-of-business) applications require support for multiple user languages, and even those that do not yet would benefit from the techniques outlined in this series.

In my position as a Developer Evangelist for Telerik’s XAML product line (Silverlight and WPF) I am frequently asked questions about how to internationalize a Silverlight app. I poked around on Google and found that there wasn’t very much information on this subject, and most of it was out of date, so I figured it would be appropriate to put together this series.