Localizability Vs Localization
| The ability of a product and/or content (including text and non-text elements) to be adapted for any local market (locale) is known as Localizability.
The process of adapting a product and/or content (including text and non-text elements) to meet the language, cultural, and political expectations and/or requirements of a specific local market (locale) is known as Localization. |
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The resource format used for Windows Forms is the ResX format
ResX resource template
- can be used for string resources
- is supported by the project system in the development environment
Windows Forms provide localization support:
- every form has a localizable property
Visual Studio .NET builds on this foundation and adds localization support to the forms package Windows Forms. The Windows Forms designer in the development environment implements the recommended model to create multi-lingual applications with satellite assemblies transparently.
Localizable property set to True
- the project system automatically keeps track of different language versions of a form
- builds the different language forms into satellite assemblies.
Setting the Localizable property of a form to True and setting the Language property of the form to different cultures (locales) creates a set of resource files each containing the language-specific properties of that form (captions, font settings, sizing etc.). The resource format is the ResX format described earlier. The generated set of resource files is only visible when the option View All Files is selected for the Solution Explorer. When the project is built the main assembly and the satellite assemblies for all provided languages are generated.
Among the file templates that can be added to a project in Visual Studio .NET is also a ResX resource template. This enables the management and localization of shared string resources in a project. If .resx files added to the project are named <name>.xx-XX.resx or <name>.xx.resx (xx-XX/xx are culture identifiers according to RFC 1766 format), the project system builds them into separate localized satellite assemblies located in subdirectories named with the culture identifiers.
External localization process
Any XML localization tool can be used
WinRes: tool for visual editing of Windows Forms
- contained in .NET Framework SDK
- does not require access to source
3rd party localization tools enabled for the new resource format:
The Visual Studio .NET development environment provides editing capabilities to create localized applications. But very likely there will be situations when localization of Windows Forms applications will be outsourced. For this the XML-based resource format ResX is very useful because the strings in it can be localized by any XML localization tools.
Should the need arise to also change the layout of the localized form the .NET Framework SDK provides the standalone tool WinRes to allow visual editing of localizable form properties. For visual editing the ResX file for the original language of the project (<form name> .resx) has to be provided to the localization process, because only it contains all necessary information for visual editing. The Windows Forms designer only tracks differences from the original language to the localized languages in the language-specific ResX files (<form name> .xx[-XX].resx). WinRes also works with resources that are already compiled into binary form (i.e. the .resources file format). Microsoft is also working with third parties to enable their localization tools for the new resource format. Two important software localization tools ForeignDesk and Catalyst are already enabled to handle the new format.