An Introduction to Internationalization
So here we are three chapters in and we’re only just getting an “Introduction” – this isn’t a criticism, it reflects the amount of groundwork that has to be done in order to provide a solid understanding of internationalisation and all it entails. This chapter discusses the notion of World-Readiness. Specifically, it covers internationalisation, globalisation and localisation (often abbreviated to I18N, G11N and L10N). Interestingly, and this serves to repeat that internationalisation is not just about changing all the text in an application, this chapter also covers the concepts of localizability and customisability. Customisability – your application provides a means of handling different VAT schemes; localizability – your application essentially uses replaceable Resources that can be changed at run-time.
The author then provides an explanation of those culture strings that we’re so used to seeing as part of downloads, e.g. en-US or en-GB
Resource files are covered in some detail, with particular reference to Visual Studio 2005 – although box-outs provide advice for those still working with Visual Studio 2003. I was pleased to see the author provide an example of localisation using nothing more than MessageBox.Show(). The example is built from the ground up and becomes more complex as the chapter progresses – it goes from a basic .NET 1.1 example right through to using a strongly-typed resource file in .NET 2.0. The author clearly believes in strongly-typed resource files – he has written his own strongly typed resource builder class for .NET 1.1 and makes it freely available to readers.
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