MCAD/MCSD Visual C# NET Certification All-in-One Exam Guide in Visual C#

Generating UPC Symbol in Visual C# MCAD/MCSD Visual C# NET Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

Figure 15-3

To test the application, you need to change the locale for your computer The locale is controlled by the Control Panel s Regional Settings Select English (Canada) and notice that the welcome message has changed, but all the other strings are the same as they were for the English locale That only the items defined for English (Canada) changed and all others stayed the same is an example of the fallback resource where we used the existing content from the default (stringsresx) resource for all resources that were not defined in the specific English-Canadian resource Figure 15-4 shows the display using Swedish as the locale The ResourceManager class is what makes this seamless change between locales possible The following section will look at how the ResourceManager class works

The first thing we need to look at is how the resource files are compiled into one assembly The name of the resource file is the key to how Visual Studio NET handles the compilation as we stated earlier, the format of the filename is <resource> <culture>resx The <culture> portion of the filename is used to build a hierarchy for languages and countries, and the file that has no <culture> in the name is the default or fallback culture The ResourceManager class is what makes localization a convenient exercise rather than a chore It gives us access to resources and provides the fallback when a resource does not exist When the ResourceManager object is instantiated from the class, we provide information to it regarding the root name for the assembly created

Figure 15-4

when the resource was compiled (in the example in the previous section, the root is Localestrings) and the main assembly for the resource In that example, we instantiated the ResourceManager using the following line:

locRM = new ResourceManager("Localestrings", typeof(WebForm1)Assembly);

Any call to the methods of the ResourceManager will now use the assembly located in the bin directory in the root of the application The additional satellite assemblies for the different cultures are to be compiled into assemblies that use names that include the locale To retrieve a resource from a resource assembly, you need to call methods like GetString() on the ResourceManager object For example, to retrieve the resource stored under the name txtWelcome and assign it to a header on the page, you could use the following code:

The culture that the ResourceManager works with is the current culture of the thread that is executing To ensure you use the culture of the client rather than the culture of the server, you need to ensure that you change to the culture according to the client In the following example, we will use the Request object s UserLanguages collection and select the first language in that collection by using Request

UserLanguages[0] as the parameter; this will change the culture and the UI culture (for graphical elements) of the current thread The following two lines will do this:

ThreadCurrentThreadCurrentCulture = CultureInfoCreateSpecificCulture(RequestUserLanguages[0]); ThreadCurrentThreadCurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo(RequestUserLanguages[0]);

Once the culture is changed on the thread, that particular user s session will be configured to use the culture of the user s computer One final note on localization: the namespaces that need to be imported are SystemGlobalization (which provides support for the ISO locale system), SystemResources (which provides support for resource assemblies), and SystemThreads (which provides support for the threads you need to manipulate) Once imported, they will give access to all the features you need in order to support a localized application Whenever you build applications whose users cultures may use different writing directions for text, you ll need to use a special property of the Web Form The NET Framework exposes the dir property of the Web Form, which controls the text direction This property is inherited by all server controls The dir property can be set to ltr (left to right) or rtl (right to left) ltr is the default The final version of the example HTML module in this section is listed here

<%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="WebForm1aspxcs" AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="LocaleWebForm1" %> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 40 Transitional//EN" > <HTML> <HEAD> <title>WebForm1</title> </HEAD> <body MS_POSITIONING="GridLayout"> <form id="Form1" method="post" runat="server"> <h1><%=locRMGetString("txtWelcome")%></h1> <asp:Label id="Label1" runat="server" accessKey="L"></asp:Label> <asp:Button id="Button1" runat="server"></asp:Button> </form> </body> </HTML>

The codebehind module for the localization example is as follows:

using using using using using using using using using using using System; SystemCollections; SystemComponentModel; SystemData; SystemDrawing; SystemWeb; SystemWebSessionState; SystemWebUI; SystemWebUIWebControls; SystemWebUIHtmlControls; SystemResources;