Testing Internationalization Using FxCop
Automating anything that a developer does is a good thing. FxCop automates the “checking of code”, ensuring that the developer doesn’t forget to adhere to a best practice, internal design standard or even the rules of localisation of your application. FxCop is a static code analysis tool that is available for both Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 – essentially, you run it against your code and it tells you which rules you may have broken or come close to breaking.
This chapter provides a good overview of how best to use FxCop in both a WinForms and ASP.NET environment. The author provides a good discussion around FxCop’s built-in globalisation rules – some of the rules have “interesting” short descriptions, hence the discussion is rather useful. Clearly the author has spent a lot of time looking at the way in which .NET handles globalisation and localisation, as the inclusion of decompiled IL demonstrates.
In conjunction with FxCop, this chapter provides a very detailed deep dive into the things you should be looking to include in your application to internationalise it. Whilst it’s only 50+ pages, it does present a reasonable amount of code, but packs a lot of explanation.
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