.NET Internationalization: The Developer’s Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications

12. Custom Resource Managers

SO FAR, ALL OF THE EXAMPLES THAT YOU have seen have used one of the two resource managers that are included with the .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0—namely, System.Resources.ResourceManager and System.ComponentModel.ComponentResourceManager. In this chapter, I show how you can write your own resource managers. You might want to do this to read/write resources from a different format (e.g., a database) or to provide additional functionality to a resource manager. I start by explaining how the “file-based” resource manager embedded in the ResourceManager class works. This feature has been largely ignored until now, as its implementation is somewhat flawed. However, the basic idea is sound, and knowledge of what it does helps ...