Windows® Phone 7 Application Development 24-Hour Trainer

Chapter 22. Localization

As you develop your application you should be thinking about the markets to which you will eventually want to make your application available for sale. If you decide that you want to make your application available to multiple global markets, you should consider localizing your application for the languages and cultures to which you will be releasing it. Localization is the process of adapting software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.

LOCALIZATION

After you have determined the languages in which you will make your application available, the first step in localization is to separate resources, such as strings, images, and videos, from your code into separate resource-only files. This ensures that your code is language-independent and can support different language encodings.

Creating and Adding Resource Files

Each language that you intend to support will have its own separate resource file containing all the localized resources. When you localize your application you will create a default resource file and then create a separate resource file for each of the other languages.

To create the default resource file, right-click the project in the Solution Explorer and select Add New Item. Select Resource File as the item type and give the file a name such as Resources.resx. If the default language for your application will be English for the United States, this is the file to which you add the resource strings ...