Localization of Windows Forms in C# with VS.NET

Introduction
Creating applications that are ready for the international market has become a key tenant in any  application today. The need is to create applications that can cater to various different countries, cultures as well as reduce the cost of developing and debugging separate applications for each country. Creating applications that are ready to cater to different countries of the world is called as Internationalization.

Internationalization has two separate issues, which are often very confusing for developers to understand. These issues are Globalization and Localization.
In layman’s terms :
Globalization refers to creating applications where the currency format, date format, numerical system might differ. For example, the currency symbol for USA Dollar is $ while the currency symbol for UK Pound is £, hence your application supporting globalization should be able to automatically pickup the correct format from the users operating system and use it.
Localization refers to creating applications where the screen text, strings, pictures might differ from language to language. (Please note I am not referring to programming languages here, but spoken languages! )

In this short article I will cover the creation of a simple “Localized” Windows Forms application. So as you might have already guessed, it will deal with creating a Windows Forms application that displays differently in different languages.
Since my knowledge of foreign languages except English is Zero, I will be working with Hindi (I am not good at typing this too..) and English !!

Prerequisites
1) VS.NET v7.0.9466 (.NET SDK v1.0.3705)
2) Windows 2000 (I guess admin access might be required..).
And please backup your stuff!!
3) Basic understanding of C# and Windows Forms…
4) If you do not have the necessary font's installed on your computer, parts of this article may look garbled! Only way out is to install the necessary fonts.

Setting-up Windows 2000 to support Hindi Language
One of the good features of Windows 2000 is that you can work with multiple languages from within the same OS. But by default not all languages get installed (to save space and startup time..) so you will have to first install the Hindi language fonts if they are not already installed.

Go to Start menu -> Control Panel -> Regional Options to start the Regional Options dialog (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Regional Options Dialog

Figure 2: Text Services Dialog

How does .NET Handle Localization??
.NET applications rely on Resource files (*.resx) to deal with Localization. The logic is simple, every bit of resource like label string, menu string, pictures, error messages, control size and location, etc are stored in these XML formatted resource files. Hence for each different language your application will support you create a new resource file and place the relevant translation (translation to be done by a human translator) of the strings and pictures into the resource files. At runtime the appropriate resource file is selected and the resources are used from it to display the necessary UI, making your single application localized.
.NET follows a consistent naming pattern for resource files so that the correct resource file is selected. The default resource file is saved as <ClassName>.resx. (Where ClassName is the name of the class that host’s the Main method to start the application.) Now for other languages you have to utilize the Culture Name for that language. MSDN documentation states that, “The culture names follow the RFC 1766 standard in the format "<languagecode2>-<country/regioncode2>", where <languagecode2> is a lowercase two-letter code derived from ISO 639-1 and <country/regioncode2> is an uppercase two-letter code derived from ISO 3166.”
Hence our Hindi resource file will be named <ClassName>.hi.resX. (Where hi is the culture name for Hindi ).
If you have the VS.NET Documentation installed check out the following link to get a full list of Culture Names.
[ms-help://MS.VSCC/MS.MSDNVS/cpref/html/frlrfSystemGlobalizationCultureInfoClassTopic.htm ]

Let’s Kick some Code!
Finally, we start writing our application!! I am assuming that you are familiar with VS.NET, and so I will not be describing small little steps… The source code is attached, you can refer to it if you have doubts!

1) Start VS.Net and create a new Windows Application project, call it as LocalizationDemo.

2) Drag 1 GroupBox, 2 RadioButtons and 1 Button on to the Designer, and make the Form look like figure 3.

Figure 3: Form Design

Figure 4: Form2 Designer

7) Switch back to the Form2 Designer window and select the form in the Designer; and from the Properties window set the Localizable property of this form to true, indicating that this form supports Localization.

8) While Form2 is selected in the Designer window, from the Properties window, change the Language property from (default) to Hindi. This will prompt VS.Net to add another Resource file in the project with the name Form2.hi.resx. (I hope you remember why the particular naming style is adopted !!).
Please remember that all the changes that you make from here on to the components property will only get reflected while the user is viewing the application with the culture Hindi. In case you have added some new controls, you will have to switch back to the Default Language property of the Form and again make the changes in the default language also. This way you have to keep switching between the different languages you support in you applications and make the necessary UI changes to support all the different languages your application supports.

9) Now time to code in Hindi!! Go to Regional Options and change the default Keyboard to Hindi (I hope you remember how to do this!!).

10) Many times on English version of VS.NET source code files are saved in Western European (Windows) - Codepage 1252 format, hence if you try to directly enter Unicode Characters in Properties window it does not work correctly. Hence switch to code view for Form2 and then from File menu -> Advanced Save Options dialog change the Encoding to Unicode (UTF-8 with Signature) - Codepage 65001 and click OK. This step will ensure that in future the source code file is saved in UTF-8 format.

11) Switch back to Design view and change the Text property of the Label to reflect नमस्ते (Hello in Hindi) and also change the Font to Mangal. Then change the Text property of the button to बंद (Close in Hindi). Lastly, I have also changed to PictureBox to show another picture. The changes shown look like figure 5.

Figure 5: Hindi translation of Form2

private void button1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
  if( this.radioButton1.Checked )
  {
    //Get the Default installed culture
    System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = 
         System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InstalledUICulture ; 
  }
  else if( this.radioButton2.Checked )
  {
    //Get the Hindi culture
    System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = 
      new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("hi") ;
  }
  Form2 f2 = new Form2();
  f2.Show();

}

14) That’s It !! Build your code and run it, if you followed the steps correctly the application should build and work correctly!!

Some Improvements
Here is a list of improvements you could make,
1) Currently, I am asking the user to give the language preference every time he runs the application. It would be a better design if you would ask for the user’s language preference only once at install time, and then store the language preference into the application configuration file.
2) This applications takes it for granted that the default language of the user is English, in your application you should not make this assumption, instead you should build an additional English (en) resource file separately an not rely on the default resource file.

Conclusion
.NET has provided an extensive platform that support Internationalization. VS.NET harnesses this and helps you easily create applications supporting Internationalizations.
This article showed you one way of working with Localization through VS.NET.

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