Internationalization

Making your ASP.NET Global Resource files work in JavaScript. IntelliSense included!

By

Any modern web application needs localization! You simply can’t ignore the huge amounts of people who doesn’t speak your language, or whose native language is different from yours. You’re probably using resource files (.resx) in .NET, but how do you go about getting values from your resource files in JavaScript? Rick Strahl wrote a great blog post about an HttpHandler that serves the content of your resource files in JavaScript. You basically add a script tag to your page that points to the HttpHandler, and the HttpHandler will produce the resources in JavaScript as an object with properties on it, like this: [code lang="js"]var localRes = { AreYouSureYouWantToRemoveValue: "Sind Sie sicher dass Sie diesen Wert l\u00F6schen wollen?", BackupComplete: "Der Backup f\u00FChrte erfolgreich durch", BackupFailed: "Der Backup konnte nicht durchgef\u00FChrt werden", BackupNotification: "Diese Operation macht einen Backup von der Lokalisationtabelle. \nM\u00F6chten … Continued

Translate text in C#, using Google Translate, revisited

By

A long time ago, I wrote a blog post about how to translate text in C# using Google Translate. Since then, an official AJAX API has been released, which is a much better solution. Reading the comments of the blog post indicates that the code was broken quite quickly! Google’s AJAX Language API, also includes functionality to detect language from a given string. All you can do on translate.google.com you can do via the API. Reading the class reference for the Translation API, for Flash and other Non-Javascript environments gives us the information we need to perform translations from C#. Most important is the URL and the parameters required and accepted. Another very important thing we can read in the documentation is this: Applications MUST always include a valid and accurate http referer header in their requests We must remember … Continued

Unit test for verifying references from DataAnnotation validation to the ErrorMessageResourceName value

By

I love the new model validation features in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. One thing I don’t like though, is that the ErrorMessageResourceName is loosely typed. The ErrorMessageResourceType, however, is a System.Type which will be strongly typed by assigning its value using the typeof(Namespace.ResourceSetType) method. Since there’s no build-breaking reference between a resource file and the value of the ErrorMessageResourceName on all classes where you use it, I thought it would be cool to have a unit test that verifies the existence of all referenced resource keys. Remember to add a reference to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations. Code /// <summary> /// Verifies that all properties that are decorated with validation data-annotations, refers to /// an existing resource. This will make sure, that missing resources are not referenced. /// </summary> [TestMethod] public void All_Properties_With_Validation_Annotations_Must_Refer_To_Existing_Resource() { Assembly assembly = Assembly.Load(new AssemblyName(“MyApp.Model.Namespace”)); var types = assembly.GetTypes().Where<Type>(t => t.IsClass && !t.IsAbstract); … Continued

Automatically translate Global and Local Resource (resx) files

By

Yesterday, I blogged about how you can use Google Translate to translate a string in C#. To make it more useful than just a simple translator, and because I need to translate some Global Resource files for an E-commerce website that I’m working on, I wanted to create a small Windows Application in C# that could read a Global Resource file (.resx) and translate it into a selected language using the method for translating a word in C# that i blogged about yesterday. This is how it looks so far. You simply select the resource file you want to translate. Select the current language of the resource file in the middle box, and select the language you want to translate it to in the last box. Click Translate at it should work. The new resource file will be saved in … Continued

Designing for Internationalization

By

Web sites and Web Applications today, are very often exposed beyond the borders of your home country, and therefore users speak different languages, and has a different currency, date- and time formats etc. ASP.NET provides you with an entire namespace for handling things like this. That is the System.Globalization namespace, where you will find a lot of classes for handling your every day globalization tasks. I’m not going to cover anything in this namespace now, if you want to get your hands dirty take a look at this video: http://asp.net/learn/videos/video-40.aspx where you will see how to use local and global resources for your application. Using a global resource file for a place to store display text on buttons, labels, validation controls etc. is fine. But if you have an e-commerce site, selling products in multiple regions with different languages, you … Continued