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C# Internationalization Posted 2006.05.28 09:14 PDT (#)

I've been playing with C# lately with an eye towards using it at work instead of the nasty legacy C++ codebase. And one of the pieces I'm still struggling with is internationalization. On unix we use the infamous gettext _() macro, which works in the source as a marker that its string needs to be translated, and at runtime as a function which looks up the translated string. In MFC we use numeric resources and utility functions like CString::LoadString(IDS_MYSTRING) or constructors like CString(MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDS_MYSTRING)). In C#, at least as presented in Visual Studio 2005, the idea is similar to the latter.

So I tried to use it. You create a resource file, add some strings to it, and then it's time to use them. You can try something like the following (which I'm not sure is correct):

ResourceManager rm = new ResourceManager();
string mystring = rm.GetString("MyString");

But there's one major quirk here. Unlike the unix or C++ methods, this is using a raw literal which is not a desired value. If you mess up the value passed to GetString(), you'll catch it at runtime. Clearly that's not the right way. You could make constants for these lookup strings, but that doubles the work. Turns out there's a better way.

Whatever you named your .resx resource file, there's an automatic type-safe class generated behind the scenes for you with static property accessors. So if I called it Strings.resx and had a string MyString, there's an accessor already set up so all I need is:

string mystring = Strings.MyString;

I'm new to C# in .NET 2.0, and the documentation isn't quite clear on this point, but I get the feeling this support is new to VS2005. It's definitely a nice experience for resource-style internationalization.