Microsoft .NET Internationalization

• Make the .NET World a Friendlier Place with the Many Faces of the CultureInfo Class
  

  This article discusses the right choices for your use of CultureInfo and its related classes in the System.Globalization namespace in your future projects.

• Resources and Localization (MSDN Magazine)
  

  Article on how to utilize resources files from your .NET Framework-based application.

• Ten Things to Know Before Internationalizing an Application
  

  Slides from a popular presentation by Guy Smith Ferrier.

• Globalization Architecture for ASP.NET
  

  This article provides background information on globalization, explains the deployment architecture of .NET resources, and discusses the specific challenges of ASP.NET globalization and how to architect your applications to provide the greatest development productivity and easiest maintenance.

• Globalization Issues in ASP and ASP.NET
  

  Before ASP.NET, there was no structured support for the development of applications for global users. During the early development of ASP, developers found only scattered support for globalization in operating systems, browsers, ASPs and back-end systems. However, they seldom observed any automatic connectivity across these applications. Fortunately, developers did understand concepts such as character sets, code pages, browser languages, and fonts which we could leverage for the development of applications for global users. This document goes into a series of concepts that relate to a variety of those issues.

• ASP.NET: Working with Resource Files
  

  Resource management, a feature of the .NET Framework class library, can be used to extract localizable elements from source code and to store them with a string key as resources. At runtime an instance of the ResourceManager class can be used to resolve the key to the original resource or a localized version. Resources can be stored as independent ("loose") files or as a part of an assembly.

• Support for Arabic in the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.NET
  

  This website provides a whitepaper and samples that explain how to work with Arabic text and how to create applications for this region.

• Developing Arabic Windows Forms Applications
  

  In this paper, you will explore the enhanced rtl features introduced by Visual Studio 2005.

• Comparing and Sorting Text for Arabic Cultures in Visual Studio .NET
  

  This article demonstrates to what extent the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET support Arabic.

• .NET Framework Developer's Guide: Developing World-Ready Applications
  

  In-depth information about globalization and localization in the .NET Framework.

• .NET Framework Developer's Guide: Best Practices for Developing World-Ready Applications
  

  This article describes the best practices to follow when developing world-ready applications.

• What's New in the .NET Framework Version 4.0: Globalization and Localization
  

  Changes to the classes and enumerations in the System.Globalization namespace provide greater support for developing applications intended for different languages and cultures.

• .NET Framework: System.Globalization Namespace
  

  Contains classes that define culture-related information, including the language, the country/region, the calendars in use, the format patterns for dates, currency, and numbers, and the sort order for strings. These classes are useful for writing globalized (internationalized) applications.

• Introduction to International Applications Based on the .NET Framework
  

  In Visual Studio, there are two parts to creating a world-ready application: globalization, the process of designing applications that can adapt to different cultures, and localization, the process of translating resources for a specific culture.

• Globalization and Localization Namespaces in Visual Studio
  

  Covers the namespaces in the .NET Framework for globalizing and localizing applications and components.

• Visual Studio: Planning World-Ready Applications
  

  Page with links to articles that present you with an overview of globalization and localization and issues surronding them, how to plan for localization, and how to test for globalization and localization.

• Visual Studio: Globalizing and Localizing Applications
  

  Discusses the steps needed to make your application useful for an international audience.

• Resources and Localization Using the .NET Framework SDK
  

  Tutorial to show how to work with text and image resources to build .NET-based applications, components, and Web applications using the .NET Framework SDK.

• Deployment in Visual Studio: Deployment and Localization
  

  How to deploy and package localized applications using Microsoft Installer technology.

• Visual Studio: Globalization and Localization of Office Solutions
  

  Discusses issues involved with localizing Office solutions, including static text, which must be handled separately from the assembly and other managed resources.

• Visual Studio: How to Localize Excel Solutions
  

  Demonstrates how to store strings for Microsoft Office Excel 2003 user interface elements in the project's default assembly resource file to enable localization.

• Visual Basic: Console: Localized Hello World Sample
  

  The Localized Hello World sample demonstrates creating and using satellite assemblies for console applications.

• Visual Basic: Windows Forms: Localization Sample
  

  The Windows Forms Localization sample demonstrates techniques for localizing a Windows Forms application with Visual Basic .NET.

• Visual C#: LocalizedHelloWorld Sample
  

  The Localized Hello World sample demonstrates creating and using satellite assemblies for console applications.

• Visual C#: MultilingualForm Sample
  

  The MultilingualForm sample demonstrates creating and localizing windows forms.

• .NET Quickstart Samples: Globalization and NLS
  

  Samples that show how to handle different cultures, character encodings and currencies.

• .NET Quickstart Samples: Resources
  

  Samples that show the use of the System.Resources namespace which is mainly used for localization.

• .NET Quickstart Samples: ASP.NET Localization
  

  A range of samples demonstrating globalization & localization of ASP.NET applications.

• How to: Create Custom Cultures with the .NET Framework
  

  This sample shows how to create a custom culture that can be used to load resources and provide formatting information, in both C# and VB.

• Walking Unicode Strings that Contain Surrogates Pairs and Combining Characters
  

  This sample builds upon the support provided by the .NET Framework for Unicode surrogates pairs and combining characters and provides an easy way to walk such strings.

• .NET Internationalization: The Developer's Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications
  

  Written by Guy Smith-Ferrier, published by Addison-Wesley (2006).

• Developing International Software, 2nd. Edition
  

  This handbook covers all the essentials for developing international software, while disseminating the collective wisdom and experience of the Microsoft international teams. Published by Microsoft Press.

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