Convert .Resources File To .Resx' title='Convert .Resources File To .Resx' />Globalization and Localization in. NET Part IWhat about making an application for restaurant billing world wide, or a web site which can be used by people of different cultures, speaking different languages. Here is a sequence of articles, to teach you, how to make applications, web sites for global usage by using the. NET framework. Localization means process of translating resources for a specific culture, and Globalization means process of designing applications that can adapt to different cultures. Before one thinks about making any Globalize App, heshe should plan the app. You cannot embed a. You must convert your. This is a list of file formats used by computers, organized by type. Filename extensions are usually noted in parentheses if they differ from the file format name or. Always think about the 2 aspects  Proper Globalization  Your Application should be able to Accept, Verify, and Display All global kind of data It should well also be able to operate over this Data, accordingly. We will discuss more about this Accordingly operations over diff. Localizability and Localization  Localizability stands for clearly separating the components of culture based Operations regarding the user interface, and other operations from the executable code. And why so Because, one shall not be writing diff. User interface issues. Last thing, Localization, this as stated earlier is the phaseprocess during which the resources will be translated to be used for a specific culture. NET framework, has greatly simplified the task of creating the applications targeting the clients of multiple cultures. The namespaces involved in creation of globalize, localizing applications are System. Globalization. System. Resources. System. Hard Disk Tools [All] there. Text. The utmost basic entity in this scenario is Culture. The Culture information usually called Culture. Info includes the Language, Countryregion, Calendar, Formats of Date, Currency, number System, And Sorting Order. This all information is defined inside Culture. Info class, which is inside the System. Globalization namespace. To understand a culture lets compare two cultures. Culture Name. Culture Identifier. Language Country Region. Fr FR0x. 04. 0CFrench France. Hi IN0x. 04. 39. Hindi India. A complete list of cultures is available at http msdn. Piranha Car Mp3 Player Driver. Earth 2 Special Low Frequency Version Zip. System. Globalization. Culture. Info. Class. Topic. asp. According to MSDN, The culture names follow the RFC 1. ISO 6. 39 1 and lt countryregioncode. ISO 3. 16. 6. The object raised from this class, when set true will be changing the culture of your application. But its never so that you make an app. In English culture, and raise an object of Culture. Info class for French language, and automatically everything will start working in French. For each cultures UI, that is the text, images you want to see over the forms or web pages youll have to define the translations explicitly. This information is known as resources, and they exist in form of. These are xml files, and to read, write, manage them there are various classes listed under the namespace System. Resources. The appearance of wild card characters, languages with Non  Latin characters like Hindi, Kannad, Urdu, Hebrew e. Unicode Why Unicode, UTF 7,8 character encoding is required, The classes represented in the System. Text namespace are used to convert the block of bytes to and from characters. The cultures also follow a hierarchy, the hierarchy is as follows Invariant culture  Neutral Culture Specific Culture. The Invariant Culture is culture language insensitive, we can refer to it by empty string. Or by its Culture Identifier 0x. F. The Language is English by default but its not associated with any country, although using it may lead to a wrong sort order but its very rare. When you dont specify a culture, its by default Invariant. Neutral Culture is only associated with language but not country, while Specific Culture is associated with the language as well as the country and region. Let us walkthrough an example to create an application which will change its Text properties UI, as and when the language of the system will be changed. Create a Windows application VB C, Name it Localized. App, now just Set the forms Localizable property to true, at this time the default language is set to English United States. Place a Label Control over your form Say WelLabel, and Set its text property to How are you from the properties window. Let us now program this application for multilingual support Ill program it for Hindi India, and French France cultures. How are you is equivalent to comment soyez vous in French France, and is equivalent to in Hindi India. Now change your Forms Language Property to French France, set the labels WelLabel Text property to comment soyez vous, save your program, and compile it. Again change the Forms language property to Hindi India, and set the labels WelLabel text property to, Also set the Labels Font to Mangal, Save your project and compile it. Now, just give a look to your right side solution explorer window, click over the Tab button Show All Files, it should look like this As you can see now, under Form. The file which is at bottom Form. Forms Localizable property to True. The remaining four files can be grouped amongst two groups French group, and Hindi group. Each group contains two files 1st FormName. Culture. resx or say Form. Form. 1. hi. resx. FormName. neutralculture Specific. Culture. resx or Form. FR. resx or Form. IN. resx. Lets study the contents of both of these files, open the Neutral Culture file, here Ill consider the file Form. Data, and resheader. Data Table Data Contains fields like Name, value, comment, type, and mime type, and for your amazing ness these all fields are empty while if we open the Specific Culture file say Form. IN. resx, it also contains similar data tables Data, and resheader, this time the data table data is filled up, the data in this data table is specific to the label control, these are the properties subjected to change when we will load the specific culture, you can deliberately alter this file After you are aware of the know hows of globalization trade. Now, just change the Language of your system from Control Panel   Regional And Language Options, change the Language from English United States to French France, and try running your program, voila its showing the message Comment Soyez Vous over the label control. Now change this Language to Hindi India, and see the difference. Note keep your windows CD with you it will be required to change the language. We are done with a real basic taste of localizing an application, according to the current language of your system. In Part  2. We will discuss doing this all and more from code only, and Making an application which will change its language, UI on the will of user with out changing the language of the system. UNICODE, UTF 7, UTF 8. The Unicode is a coded character set which can represent 4. Characters, ranging from various languages. Let us first understand the ASCII codes ASCII code is a 8 bit byte code, which can maximum represent 2. Each byte can represent a character. Like 0. 10. 00. 00. A, and so on. This way the Maximum chars represented 2. Now, how do we extend this range to get a larger character set, the idea is to add up a Character Encoding Scheme with the Character coding scheme. This way you can increase the range from 8 bit to 1. CCS 8 bit CES 8 bit New character set Or UTF 1. This set can represent 2. For, deep insights just follow the address http czyborra.