This hel

2. Introduction
 Globalization is about internationalizing applications:
the application supports number and date formats
depending on the culture.
 Localization is about translating applications for
specific cultures.

3. Globalization (Internationalization)
 Its is a process of creating an application that
supports localized user interfaces.
Localization = translation
 It is the process of translating the applications
into different languages.

4.  If you plan on distributing your application to an
international audience, there are a number of things you'll
need to keep in mind during the design and development
phases. Even if you don't have such plans, a small effort up
front can make things considerably easier should your
plans change in future versions of your application.
Services built into the .NET Framework make it easy to
develop a single application that can adapt to different
locales using managed development with Visual Basic or
Visual C#.
 Visual Studio .NET was designed from the start to make
developing for an international audience easy by taking
advantage of services built into the .NET Framework. The
following topics will help introduce you to the
internationalization features built into Visual Studio .NET.

5. One Code Base

6. Cultures and Regions
 The world is divided into multiple cultures and regions, and applications have to be
aware of these cultural and regional differences. A culture is a set of preferences based
on a user’s language and cultural habits.
 Some examples are en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, and en-US for the English language in
Australia,
 Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States.
 While one region has multiple languages, one language can be spoken in different
regions; for example, Spanish is spoken in Mexico, Spain, Guatemala, Argentina, and
Peru, to name but a few.

7.  The most important class in the System.Globalization
namespace is the class CultureInfo.
 CultureInfo represents a culture and defines calendars,
formatting of numbers and dates, and sorting strings that
are used with the culture.
 The class RegionInfo represents regional settings (such
as the currency) and shows if the region is using the
metric system. In the same region, you can use multiple
languages.
 One example is the region of Spain with its Basque (eu-
ES), Catalan (ca-ES), Spanish (es-ES), Galician (gl-ES)
cultures.

8. Types of Culture
 Invarient
 Neutral
 Specific

9. Invariant Culture
 Should be used for storing data in a culture
independent way
 Should not be used for User Interface elements
 Has no country/region
Eg:
CultureInfo ci = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture

10. Neutral Culture
 Associated with a language not with country/region
 Can be used for UI related options
 Cannot be used for retrieving information such as
date/time formatting
 Specified using <languagecode2> format:
 Arabic – “ar”
 Exceptions – zh-CHT, zh-CH
Eg.
using System.Globalization;
…
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(“fr”);

11. Specific Culture
 Associated with Language and a Country/Region
 fr  Neutral Culture
 fr-FR  Specific Culture
 Provides additional information about the date, time,
currency and number formatting options
 Can be used wherever a Neutral culture is used, the
opposite is not true
Eg.
using System.Globalization;
…
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(“fr-FR”);

12. Formatting and Parsing
 Formatting
 Standard formatting characters
 Custom formatting characters
 Parsing
 Configurable with styles
 TryParse – no conversion exceptions
 ParseExact for date/time values
Formatting
Culture-appropriate
Type Object Parsing String

13. Numeric Formats
• Store as binary data type if possible
• Integer, decimal, floating-point
• Invariant storage as text
• Format using CultureInfo.InvariantCulture
• Use standard format character “R” (reversible) for floating point
numbers

14. Currencies
decimal dec = decimal.Parse("$1000000.23",
NumberStyles.Currency,CultureInfo.CurrentCulture);
System.Console.WriteLine("{0:C}", dec);
Output: $1,000,000.23
 Preferably store as decimal with meta data
 Culture
 DateTime
 Use 3rd party service
for conversion
 When storing as text use invariant culture
 Reversible text floating-point format
 Currency text format: ¤1,000,000.23

15. System.Globalization
Namespace
 Includes classes for functionality such as:
 Culture-aware string comparison
 Coté vs. Côte (culture dependent)
 Date & Time formatting
 yy/mm/dd vs. dd/mm/yy
 Numeric formatting
 12,000.00 vs. 12.000,00
 Calendars
 Gregorian and non-Gregorian

16. CultureInfo class
 provides culture specific information
 Controls date comparisonstring comparison number
comparison etc
CultureInfo userculture=Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture
(Used for calculation and Internal Manipulation)
CultureInfo userculture=Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture
(Used for DisplayPurpose)

17. CurrentCulture Thread
 Date and number formatting
 String comparison and casing
 It determines the results of culture dependant functions.
 You can define the CurrentCulture object with specific
cultures and not with neutral cultures.

18. CurrentUICulture Thread
 It determines which resources are loaded by the Resource
Manager if you have provided resources in multiple
languages.
 Because this controls only which language is used you can
define CurrentUICulture with either neutral or specific
cultures.

19. Changing the Culture
programmatically
CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(culture);
// set culture for formatting
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ci;
// set culture for resources
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;

20. Implementing localization
 When the Localizable property is set to true, the
resource file resX is generated form the form.
BookOfTheDay.resX
 change the Language property of the form and the
properties of some form elements, a new resource file
is generated for the specified language.
BookOfTheDayForm.de.resX

21. Culture-aware Classes
 Any API which takes a culture, or an
IFormatProvider
 Culture-sensitive by default
 Examples:
 System.Globalization.CompareInfo
 System.Globalization.StringInfo
 System.Globalization.Calendar
 System.Resources
 System.DateTime
 System.String

22.  Calendar Classes
 Includes support for:
 Gregorian Calendar
 Hebrew Calendar
 Hijiri Calendar
 Japanese Calendar
 Julian Calendar
 Korean Calendar
 Taiwan Calendar
 Thai Buddhist Calendar
 Base Calendar class from which custom calendars can be
derived

23.  DateTime
 Provides methods that enable culture-sensitive
operations on a DateTime.
 Use the DateTimeFormatInfo Class to format and
display a DateTime based on culture.
 DateTimeFormatInfo
 Defines how DateTime values are formatted and
displayed, depending on the culture.

24.  CompareInfo
 Provides a set of methods that can be used to perfomr
culture-sensitive string comparisons
 The CultureInfo class has a CompareInfo property that is
an instance of the CompareInfo class
 The String.Compare method uses the information in the
CultureInfo.CompareInfo property to compare strings
 NumberFormatInfo
 Defines how currency, decimal separator and other
numeric symbols are formatted and displayed based on
culture.