How to Internationalize Your .NET ApplicationInternationalization in .NET is a phenomenon which allows the use of .NET framework for developing cross cultural applications in different languages and for different regions of world. In different words it provides techniques to build global friendly applications which are meant for global audience. Writing the code which is internationalized is a need today and it also improve maintainability and flexibility. A fundamental concept related to internationalization is locale which represents the country or region specific conventions relevant to the user.
A region
has its own representation of measurement system and currency. Also the
formatting of date and time varies from one place to other. In order to
determine the locale of a region, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
has specified RFC- 1766. It is a convention which describes the locale
in “language code-country/region” format. .NET follows this
convention too. Another important
concept for implementing the internationalization in .NET is the use of
CultureInfo class. These classes are contained in System.Globalization
namespace and contain the culture specific information like date and time
formatting rules, calendars, number formatting etc. Example of
one such class is Calendar. Calendar implementations are done for a wide
range of regions like there is GregorianCalendar, KoreanCalendar, PersianCalendar,
JapaneseCalendar and many more. Other examples of these classes are CompareInfo
and CultureInfo which represent the culture specific string comparison
methods and information about a specific locale respectively. For creating
international applications based on .NET framework you can use Visual
studio. In Visual Studio there are two steps involved. In first step you
need to create applications which are adjustable to different cultures.
Next step
involves the translation of application and resources with respect to
a specific culture. These two steps are also referred as globalization
and localization respectively. There are
four types of namespaces in .NET framework for globalization and localization
of applications and resources. First is
System.Globalization which is discussed earlier that its classes contain
culture related information. Second one
is System.Resources.Tools which contains classes supporting for strongly
typed resources. Then there
is System.Resources which consists of classes and interfaces for managing
culture related information in an application. Finally there
is System.Text namespace having the classes which represent ASCII, Unicode
and UTF-7 character encoding. So for developing
international applications for world audience in .NET, classes from these
namespaces should be used. These techniques are used for creating both
window forms as well as web applications.
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