C# 24-Hour Trainer, 2nd Edition

Lesson 33

Localizing Programs

Many programmers write applications that are used only in their countries. It's easy enough to find plenty of customers for a small application without looking for customers long distance.

However, the world has grown smaller in the past few decades, and it's not too hard to provide programs for people all over the world. Customers can download your software over the Internet and pay for it using online payment systems in a matter of minutes. Web applications that run in a browser are even more likely to be used by people all over the world.

With such a potentially enormous market, it makes sense in some cases to make programs accessible to people in different countries, particularly since C# and Visual Studio make it relatively easy.

In this lesson, you learn how to make a program accessible to customers in other countries with different cultures. You learn how to make multiple interfaces for a program so users can work in their own languages. You also learn how to work with values such as currencies and dates that have different formats in different locales.

WARNING

Localization is a huge topic so there isn't room to cover everything there is to know about it here. In particular, you should always get a native of a particular locale to help in localizing your application whenever possible. Unless you are extremely well versed in a locale's language, customs, and idioms, it's very easy to make sometimes embarrassing mistakes. (For examples, ...