Internationalisation in Visual Studio

Question

I'm fairly new to Visual Studio and am wondering how best to plan for translation in a new project I'm starting. I need to provide English, German and French.

I have used Eclipse a lot in the past and there I just developed a new app and when it was complete I could just start a wizard to externalise strings into a resource file. The strings would be given to someone for translation.

What is your experience with VS? (I'm currently using VS2005 Express) What is your best advice for planning for translation?

Answer 1

It depends on the technology you use: Win32/MFC, .NET, ...

For MFC apps, this CodeProject article of mine might be helpful to retrieve strings from resources (the String Table). And this one helps you load the desired translation at application start-up (including other goodies such as a languages menu).

Regarding translation and management of translations, appTranslator will make your life MUCH easier.

Answer 2

Head to Microsoft's I18n page

There is a nice article on msdn about the more general aspects of i18n in the Microsoft world.

Visual Studio specifically:

• MSDN VS landing page for internationalization (your best bet)
• And this msdn article deals with it on a more technical level.

Answer 3

I can thoroughly recommend reading .Net Internationalization by Guy Smith-Ferrier.

It covers the application globalisation, internationalisation and localisation options in detail (with pros and cons and excellent examples), and also topics I hadn't considered such as localising the deployment (i.e. ClickOnce and Setup Projects)

The version of the book I have is aimed at VS2005 / .Net2.0, and includes considerations for ASP.Net although it is primarily focussed on Windows Forms applications