.NET Internationalization
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Product Description
Product Description
As business becomes more and more global, software developers increasingly need to make applications multi-lingual and culturally aware. The .NET Framework may well have the most comprehensive support for internationalization and globalization of any development platform to date, and .NET Internationalization teaches developers how to unlock and utilize that support.
Experienced international application developer Guy Smith-Ferrier covers the internationalization of both Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications, using both Versions 1.1 and 2.0 of the .NET Framework. Smith-Ferrier not only teaches you the best ways to take advantage of the globalization and internationalization features built in to the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, he also provides original code to take globalized applications to the next level of international utility and maintainability.
Key topics include
• An introduction to the internationalization process and how localization and globalization are supported in Windows and the .NET Framework
• The use of resource managers, cultures, resource DLLs, and localized strings, images, and files—including strongly typed resources
• Detailed coverage of form localization in Windows Forms and Web Forms
• Dealing with regional cultures and their casing, collation, and calendars
• Managing right-to-left Middle-Eastern text and pictographic East Asian languages
• How to use the book’s original resource administration utilities
• How to translate resources with machine translation
• How to create custom cultures and integrate them with the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005
• How resource managers work and how to write custom resource managers, including a resource manager that uses a database
• How to test your internationalization with FxCop using new and existing globalization rules
• How to effectively include the translator in the internationalization process
Whether you are a developer, architect, or manager, if you are involved in international applications with the .NET Framework, this is the one book you need to read and understand before you start development.
Guy Smith-Ferrier is an author, developer, trainer, and speaker with more than 20 years of software engineering experience. He has internationalized applications in four development platforms, including the .NET Framework. A frequent conference speaker, Guy is the author of C# and .NET courseware and has written numerous articles. You can read his blog at www.guysmithferrier.com.
From the Author
You can download sample chapters (including the complete
Table Of Contents), source code, additional utilities and updates to the
book at dotneti18n.com.
Table Of Contents), source code, additional utilities and updates to the
book at dotneti18n.com.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Really good books are not only well written and informative, they change the way you think about things. I have accumulated a hotchpotch of information and half truths about internationalisation over the years, but never set out to really understand it, and its place in the development cycle. This book has allowed me to grasp internationalisation properly, and exposed me to a wealth of eye-opening insights.
Yes, I expected to learn the difference between globalisation and localisation, between left-to-right amd right-to-left languages, and between culture and UICulture. However, I had never stopped to consider how different cultures perform alphabetic sorting differently, or use different calendars. Smith-Ferrier's book not only started me thinking about the world differently, but explained how, properly used, the .NET Framework addresses many internationalisation issues transparently. I had no idea this stuff was in there.
I particularly liked the differences between 1.1 and 2.0, the appropriate separation of treatment for Web and Windows, the best practices, the road map, the attention to detail and the obvious depth of knowledge behind each sentence this author has written.
What's the point of buying yet another C# or ASP.NET book? It is refreshing to find such a good book on a topic on which few write seriously.
Yes, I expected to learn the difference between globalisation and localisation, between left-to-right amd right-to-left languages, and between culture and UICulture. However, I had never stopped to consider how different cultures perform alphabetic sorting differently, or use different calendars. Smith-Ferrier's book not only started me thinking about the world differently, but explained how, properly used, the .NET Framework addresses many internationalisation issues transparently. I had no idea this stuff was in there.
I particularly liked the differences between 1.1 and 2.0, the appropriate separation of treatment for Web and Windows, the best practices, the road map, the attention to detail and the obvious depth of knowledge behind each sentence this author has written.
What's the point of buying yet another C# or ASP.NET book? It is refreshing to find such a good book on a topic on which few write seriously.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you're serious about developing .NET applications then you should read this book to get yourself up to speed on how you might make your apps ready for shipping across the world. Even if you never intend shipping your applications outside of your home country it'll give you an insight into the issues and challenges that you might face should you later change your mind.
The book covers .NET 1.1 and 2.0, showing how the .NET 2.0 Framework make internationalization a whole lot easier.
Developers will get a lot from this book, but it'll also prove really useful for everyone on a delivery team - testers, project managers etc. It will give non-developers an insight into the efforts involved in making an application work in many languages, and will help non-developers plan accordingly.
The book is well written, and very easy to read. It's a good technical book with plenty of good samples and walk throughs.
This is one of those books that all .NET developers should have access to.
The book covers .NET 1.1 and 2.0, showing how the .NET 2.0 Framework make internationalization a whole lot easier.
Developers will get a lot from this book, but it'll also prove really useful for everyone on a delivery team - testers, project managers etc. It will give non-developers an insight into the efforts involved in making an application work in many languages, and will help non-developers plan accordingly.
The book is well written, and very easy to read. It's a good technical book with plenty of good samples and walk throughs.
This is one of those books that all .NET developers should have access to.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Everything you ever wanted to know...
18 Mar 2007
Format:Paperback
Like most English people, my multilingual capabilities extend to English, American, and Shouting. But as I've increasingly worked at conferences across Europe, I've become more aware at just how difficult it is for non-English speakers, and those for whom English is not their first language. It's when you attend a conference in somewhere like Austria, and all the sessions except yours are in German (de-AT or de-DE) that you realize you have a long way to go to even start to support other languages and cultures in your applications.
While I've tried hard to tailor my examples, by internationalizing them as far as I can using the features of ASP.NET 2.0, this book opened my eyes to the huge number of other issues that such "translated" applications actually face. It's then you realize that, without a professional approach and solid information on the whole gamut of gotchas involved, translating the text is just scratching the surface...
And that's why you really do need this book. It's packed with detailed, and often "inside" information that spans every related topic area. It covers not only theory and guidance on the best practical techniques, but tools and resources that can help. In fact, the detail it contains is so thorough that you'll find yourself reading some chapters over again to get to grips with the complex internal workings on .NET and Windows. Yet it's written in a friendly, readable, and often amusing way that makes perusing topics a pleasure as well as being informative.
Make no mistake, this is not a "read and remember" book. Be prepared to keep it near to hand as a reference, as you'll need to study each chapter to grasp and apply the techniques properly - and in enough depth - to make your application "world-ready". And even if you only ever build applications in one language, it's worth reading this book just to help you understand the internationalization features available, and the how to get the best from .NET. You never know, one day you may have to build a multi-language version of your Web site or Windows application...
While I've tried hard to tailor my examples, by internationalizing them as far as I can using the features of ASP.NET 2.0, this book opened my eyes to the huge number of other issues that such "translated" applications actually face. It's then you realize that, without a professional approach and solid information on the whole gamut of gotchas involved, translating the text is just scratching the surface...
And that's why you really do need this book. It's packed with detailed, and often "inside" information that spans every related topic area. It covers not only theory and guidance on the best practical techniques, but tools and resources that can help. In fact, the detail it contains is so thorough that you'll find yourself reading some chapters over again to get to grips with the complex internal workings on .NET and Windows. Yet it's written in a friendly, readable, and often amusing way that makes perusing topics a pleasure as well as being informative.
Make no mistake, this is not a "read and remember" book. Be prepared to keep it near to hand as a reference, as you'll need to study each chapter to grasp and apply the techniques properly - and in enough depth - to make your application "world-ready". And even if you only ever build applications in one language, it's worth reading this book just to help you understand the internationalization features available, and the how to get the best from .NET. You never know, one day you may have to build a multi-language version of your Web site or Windows application...
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
An invaluable book
1 Feb 2007
Format:Paperback
I don't rave about books very often, but this book is worth the rave.
It's perhaps the best written hard-core technical book I've ever read, and one of the few where I didn't skip half. Topics are correctly grouped and covered to an appropriate depth with clear explanations of when and why you need specific features.
If you are not familiar with internationalization - the first part of the book covers basics such as why a culture is needed and the fallback process.
If you think you know about .NET internationalization - you already know about cultures and resource managers and localizable, but you've never actually localized an application, the insight into the process - such as the value of pseudo translators will be very helpful. It also covers a boatload of language nuances from the Turkish letter I to non-cased languages.
I came to this book with an extremely difficult internationalization problem that I thought we would have to kludge by walking controls on form load. This book went deep enough into the internationalization customization points and pointed out a critical trick I had not seen, that I am building a localization system that will work for us. Instead of being kludged on top and parallel, this book showed me how to leverage the .NET extensibility to solve the problem. I did not find enough information on making the internationalization extensibility model actually work elsewhere.
I know a good bit about Winforms, the framework, and code generation and this book is solid in the coverage of these topics. I learned things I didn't know, especially that InitializeComponent code injection trick - which is also one of the best examples of why business programmers might want to know a little about the CodeDOM (one way to do code generation).
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in internationalization in .NET, whether an introduction, rubber meets the road suggestions/experience, or black belt insight into the extensibility points.
It's perhaps the best written hard-core technical book I've ever read, and one of the few where I didn't skip half. Topics are correctly grouped and covered to an appropriate depth with clear explanations of when and why you need specific features.
If you are not familiar with internationalization - the first part of the book covers basics such as why a culture is needed and the fallback process.
If you think you know about .NET internationalization - you already know about cultures and resource managers and localizable, but you've never actually localized an application, the insight into the process - such as the value of pseudo translators will be very helpful. It also covers a boatload of language nuances from the Turkish letter I to non-cased languages.
I came to this book with an extremely difficult internationalization problem that I thought we would have to kludge by walking controls on form load. This book went deep enough into the internationalization customization points and pointed out a critical trick I had not seen, that I am building a localization system that will work for us. Instead of being kludged on top and parallel, this book showed me how to leverage the .NET extensibility to solve the problem. I did not find enough information on making the internationalization extensibility model actually work elsewhere.
I know a good bit about Winforms, the framework, and code generation and this book is solid in the coverage of these topics. I learned things I didn't know, especially that InitializeComponent code injection trick - which is also one of the best examples of why business programmers might want to know a little about the CodeDOM (one way to do code generation).
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in internationalization in .NET, whether an introduction, rubber meets the road suggestions/experience, or black belt insight into the extensibility points.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
extensive i18n abilities
17 Aug 2006
Format:Paperback
Nowadays, if you are a programmer, you might be coding an application that will be deployed globally. Very different from 30 years ago, when you would usually have English-only text for your user interface. Of course, then, the UI was often just standard out and standard in.
The book shows how the .NET platform lets you handle internationalisation (i18n) in several ways. You can define strings that will appear in your UI. Grouped into several sets, each set usually specific to a language. So given the name of a string, you can write language-specific versions of it. Plus, there is a Resource fallback process, which lets you define a hierarchy of these sets. So you might make the English set the default, say. Useful if you can't find translations into some other language. Plus, you can be more specific than just specifying a language. Within a language, there might be different terms or spellings, depending on the user's location. Hence, the book describes the concept of a locale or culture. The best example is en-US and en-GB, describing American and British versions of English.
The other main aspect of the book shows how the various .NET UIs can use these Resources. For example, Internet Explorer has a control pane that lets you define different locales, and the order in which these will be used, to look up Resource values. Of course, IE comes to you pre-programmed. More importantly, the book shows how to program this ability into your own code, written perhaps using Windows Forms.
All this should sound familiar to you, if you've already been programming in Java. Which has had these capabilities since 1998 and earlier. To some extent, the book shows how .NET is still playing catch-up. And that it essentially has achieved parity with Java/J2EE in i18n.
The book also has a section which might initially seem very exciting, machine translation. Especially if you have had prior experience dealing with programs that do this. MT is a very hard problem that really belongs fully in AI research. Accurate translations often require human input. Alas, as Smith-Ferrier points out, the book reveals no breakthrough by Microsoft. Essentially, Microsoft has a Web Service that takes an input word and returns a translation into some other language. But still very limited. And you certainly can't hand it a sentence and expect a (correct) result. Its usefulness is mostly in cases where you have single words commonly used in programs, like 'file' and 'quit', and you need translations into another language commonly used in programming. On balance, however, the Web Service is better than nothing. Microsoft has taken the obvious step and automated what can easily be automated.
The book shows how the .NET platform lets you handle internationalisation (i18n) in several ways. You can define strings that will appear in your UI. Grouped into several sets, each set usually specific to a language. So given the name of a string, you can write language-specific versions of it. Plus, there is a Resource fallback process, which lets you define a hierarchy of these sets. So you might make the English set the default, say. Useful if you can't find translations into some other language. Plus, you can be more specific than just specifying a language. Within a language, there might be different terms or spellings, depending on the user's location. Hence, the book describes the concept of a locale or culture. The best example is en-US and en-GB, describing American and British versions of English.
The other main aspect of the book shows how the various .NET UIs can use these Resources. For example, Internet Explorer has a control pane that lets you define different locales, and the order in which these will be used, to look up Resource values. Of course, IE comes to you pre-programmed. More importantly, the book shows how to program this ability into your own code, written perhaps using Windows Forms.
All this should sound familiar to you, if you've already been programming in Java. Which has had these capabilities since 1998 and earlier. To some extent, the book shows how .NET is still playing catch-up. And that it essentially has achieved parity with Java/J2EE in i18n.
The book also has a section which might initially seem very exciting, machine translation. Especially if you have had prior experience dealing with programs that do this. MT is a very hard problem that really belongs fully in AI research. Accurate translations often require human input. Alas, as Smith-Ferrier points out, the book reveals no breakthrough by Microsoft. Essentially, Microsoft has a Web Service that takes an input word and returns a translation into some other language. But still very limited. And you certainly can't hand it a sentence and expect a (correct) result. Its usefulness is mostly in cases where you have single words commonly used in programs, like 'file' and 'quit', and you need translations into another language commonly used in programming. On balance, however, the Web Service is better than nothing. Microsoft has taken the obvious step and automated what can easily be automated.
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