.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Localization

The software market is a global one, and many programs will ship in regions where the users’ first language will be different from the application developers’ native tongue. While many software products get away with making the highly parochial assumption that everybody speaks English, .NET lets us do better than that. It provides support for building applications that support multiple languages.

The .NET Framework supplies facilities for localization of resources such as strings and bitmaps, and the Forms Designer can create forms that make use of this. To understand how to create localizable user interfaces, it is first necessary to understand the underlying localization mechanism that it is based on, so we will first look at global resource management, and then we will see how it is applied in a Windows Forms application.

Resource Managers

The programming model for localizable applications is based on a simple premise: whenever you require information that might be affected by the current language, you must not hardcode this information into your application. All such information should be retrieved through a culture-sensitive mechanism. (In .NET, the word culture is used to describe a locality; it implies all the relevant information, such as location, language, date formats, sorting conventions, etc.) The mechanism we use for this is the ResourceManager class, which is defined in the System.Resources namespace.

The ResourceManager class allows named pieces of data ...