Localization in ASP.NET 2.0
by Wei-Meng Lee08/08/2005
The Web is an international place. Why shouldn't your websites be ready for international visitors? Isn't that was the first two Ws ("World" and "Wide") in WWW are for? With the introduction of ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft aims to make it easier to localize your website for individual users, no matter where they hail from. In this article, I will show you how you can localize your ASP.NET 2.0 web applications. You will enable the application to display in two languages--English and Chinese.
Note: For the basics of globalization and localization, refer to my earlier articles on this topic:
- "Globalizing and Localizing Windows Applications, Part 1"
- "Globalizing and Localizing Windows Application, Part 2"
New Auto-Culture Handling in ASP.NET 2.0
ASP.NET 2.0 comes with a new auto-culture handling feature to make the task
of localizing your application easier. Auto-culture handling can be enabled
for each page by including the Culture="auto" and UICulture="auto" attributes
in the Page directive of each page. Once enabled, the ASP.NET runtime will automatically
map Accept-Language headers to CultureInfo objects and attach them to the current
thread (unlike ASP.NET 1.x, where you need to do this manually). As a developer,
you simply need to prepare the resources for the different cultures you want
to support in your application. ASP.NET will then do the work of loading the
appropriate resources for each culture as they are needed.
Implicit Localization
Let's use Visual Studio 2005 and create a new website project by going to File -> "New Web Site…." Name the project C:\Localization. For this application, I will use the Visual Basic 2005 language.
Populate the default web form, Default.aspx, with the controls, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Populating the form
Once the controls on the form are populated and named, you will generate the resources (such as the text displayed by the controls) so that they can be grouped into a single file. To do so, go to Tools -> Generate Local Resource (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Generating local resources
A new folder named App_LocalResources will now appear under your
project in Solution Explorer (see Figure 3). In the folder, you will find
the Default.aspx.resx file, which contains all of the resources used
by your form. Duplicate a copy of this resource file so that you
can use it for another language (Chinese, in this case). Right-click on Default.aspx.resx
and select Copy. Right-click on App_LocalResources
and then select Paste. Rename the newly pasted file Default.aspx.zh-CN.resx
(zh-CN is the culture code for Chinese in China).
Figure 3. The App_LocalResources folder
The Solution Explorer should now look like Figure 4.
Figure 4. The resource file for the Chinese language
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Related Reading ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook |
