Chapter 10. Resource Administration

SOCIETY CONSIDERS PARANOIA TO BE A bad trait but in the world of development, I have always found it to be a great asset. Walking home wondering if you thought of every angle, what if it's running in large fonts, what if it's running on Windows 2000, and so on might be bad for your blood pressure, but it's great for the software. When I see new technology demonstrated, Captain Paranoia always jumps up onto my shoulder and mutters things like, "I bet it works only in demos," "I bet it doesn't scale well," and "I bet it won't work if I use custom resource managers." Which brings us to the subject of managing resources. The Resource Editor in Visual Studio 2005 is a great step forward from the Resource Editor in Visual Studio 2003, but it obviously focuses on a single resource in a single language. Management of resources is a manual task, and in a large-scale project, the number of actions of adding, editing, and deleting resource entries and resources is large and, consequently, subject to error. This problem has two solutions:

1.	Create a tool that automates many of these tasks.
2.	Inspect the resulting application using static analysis to look for possible mistakes (e.g., Form.Localizable must be TRue).

The former is the subject of this chapter; the latter is the subject of Chapter 13, "Testing Internationalization Using FxCop."

This chapter describes two utilities that are included with the source code for this book:

• Resource Administrator

• Add Resource String Visual Studio Add-In

First I explain what the two utilities do and how to use them. Then I show the building blocks on which they were built. I don't show the complete source code for the Resource Administrator because it is considerable, but it is included with the downloadable source code.