WPF Localization Guidance
When you limit your product's availability to only one language, you limit your potential customer base to a fraction of our world’s 6.67 billion population. If you want your applications to reach a global audience, cost-effective localization of your product is one of the best and most economical ways to reach more customers.
It is imperative to define a globalization strategy early in the development lifecycle, in order to more quickly accommodate demands for future product releases that can reach global markets.
Application localization is not a trivial task for any type of application scenario. The process is based on a few core principles that apply to WPF as they do to any other type of client application with a user interface.
It is important for developers to understand the basic concepts of regional data display, locale-specific user interface customization and how to serve localized resources in both static and dynamic fashion. These concepts are very similar for most client applications but the actual process of localizing the static user interface components tends to vary between environments and WPF introduces yet another approach to resource localization for XAML resources.
Rick Strahl & Michele Leroux Bustamante have published a Localization Guidance whitepaper (June 2009). It starts with a quick review of general localization considerations for completeness, discusses how the .NET Framework handles resources for all applications, and then focuses specifically on localization scenarios for WPF explaining some of the trade-offs within each approach.
This whitepaper is complete and may be updated according to YOUR feedbacks.
Download it (and some source code) here: WPF Localization Guidance Whitepaper.
You may also be interested in Microsoft's WPF Globalization and Localization Overview, which has a lot in common with RIck and Michele's guidance.
And how would you implement the the translation of application resources into localized versions for the specific cultures that the application supports?
When you localize in WPF, you use the APIs in the System.Windows.Markup.Localizer namespace. These APIs power the LocBaml Tool Sample command-line tool, which was developed by Microsoft to present a sample that uses some of the localization APIs and illustrates how you might write a localization tool.
There is also the CodePlex WPF Localizationan Extention project which is a (FREE) stable extension project to localize any type of DependencyProperties on DependencyObjects.
As you can see, there are many (and good) ways to implement localization in WPF project. If you know any other great localization tools, please share it with us.
Thanks,
J.