ASP.NET Applications

The single biggest factor affecting the internationalization of ASP.NET applications is whether you use Visual Studio 2003 or Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2005 has considerable support, whereas Visual Studio 2003 offers no support beyond what the .NET Framework already offers. That is not to say that you cannot internationalize ASP.NET 1.1 applications, just that such internationalization is a manual process with no additional help from the tools.

You also must decide how users will specify their language and region. A common approach to this problem is to adopt users' language preferences from their browser (this information is passed in the HTTP header of all requests). A refined variation on this theme is to adopt users' initial settings from the browser and then let the user override the settings in a user profile. You should also decide whether users should be allowed to specify a different language and region for the user interface to the language and region for their cultural formatting. In an ASP.NET application, such different settings will lead to a schizophrenic user interface if you use the Calendar control. For example, if the user specifies that the user interface is in Spanish, but the cultural formatting is United States, a page would display in Spanish but a Calendar control on the same page would display in English.

You also need to consider exactly what gets handed over to your translator to translate. Do you give the translators just the resources or the aspx pages as well? Handing over the aspx pages introduces new problems, not the least of which is that these critical files have to be locked while with the translator (which could be days or weeks). A better solution is to ensure that all static text has been removed from your aspx pages and placed in resources. Of course, this means that the issue of formatting is now outside the hands of the translator and in the hands of the developers.

If your application caches pages (for better performance), your caching process must be language/regionaware. If it is not, the first user to access a page will have the page cached, and subsequent users will get the same cached page even if they use a different language.

You also must decide whether to use absolute or relative positioning of controls. By default, Visual Studio 2003 uses absolute positioning and Visual Studio 2005 uses relative positioning. Pros and cons exist for both approaches, but in internationalization terms, consider that absolute positioning causes significant problems for localization; this is not only because controls do not automatically reposition and resize, but also because mirroring does not work when controls are absolutely positioned. As a general rule, you should use relative positioning in internationalized applications; if you intend to use mirroring (for right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian [Farsi]), you should consider this a requirement.