Windows Forms Applications


Windows Forms applications have their own considerations. You must decide whether users are allowed to specify which language and region the application should use. Certainly, giving users a choice is always good from a functionality point of view. If you use the .NET Framework dialog controls (including MessageBox), however, you might not be able to deliver on this promise. These controls draw resources from the operating system and the .NET Framework Language Packs. Consequently, if your application is running on a Spanish version of Windows with a Spanish .NET Framework Language Pack, the dialogs will be in Spanish. This is a great time saver if your application's user interface should be in Spanish. However, if you have given users a choice of what language the application should use, they could choose a different language from the operating system (say, French), making the user interface schizophrenic (part would be in French, and part would be in Spanish).

If you decide to give your users a choice, you will also need to decide how users specify that choice. You might choose to let users specify this in the Regional and Language Options Control Panel applet. This is convenient, but you should also consider what would happen if they change this setting while the application is running. An alternative is to offer some menu setting inside the application. If you do this, you should consider whether a change to the language here means that the setting applies immediately or when the application next starts. If it applies immediately, you will need a way of refreshing the entire application's user interface (see Chapter 4, "Windows Forms Specifics," for a number of solutions).

If your application is a Windows Forms 2.0 application and you intend to use ClickOnce to deploy and update your application, you should also consider whether the ClickOnce user interface should be localized. The question here is this:

Is the user interface of the deployment and update mechanism separate from that of the application? For example, if you write a Spanish application, should the ClickOnce interface also be in Spanish? If the answer is yes you will also need to localize ClickOnce (see Chapter 4).




.NET Internationalization(c) The Developer's Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications
.NET Internationalization: The Developers Guide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications
ISBN: 0321341384
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 213

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