What is the best approach to centralzing error messages in an application?

Question

All throughout an application wherever error messages (or other user messages) are used I typically hard-code a string. Obviosly this can be really bad (especially when you may have to come back and localize an app). What is the best approach to centralize these strings? A static class? Constants? An XML File? Or a combination (like creating a static class with constants that are used to read from an xml file).

Answer 1

Use string resources.

Answer 2

.net has a pretty good support for so-called ressource-files where you can store all strings for one language.

Answer 3

I've always defined constants wherever they make the most sense based on your language (a static class? application-wide controller? resource file?) and just call them where/whenever needed. Sure they're still "hard-coded" in a way at that point, but they're also nicely centralized, with naming conventions that make sense.

Answer 4

Create the strings in a resource file. You can then localise by adding additional resource files.

Check out http://geekswithblogs.net/dotNETPlayground/archive/2007/11/09/116726.aspx

Answer 5

Create a Resource (.resx) file and add your strings there. VS will generate a class for you for easy access to these resources with full intellisence. You can then add localised resources in the same manner.

Answer 6

Does anyone else find the use of .Net resource files constricting? I dislike having a bottleneck file that will always have multiple developers contending for it. I think it also makes refactoring more difficult when you need to move modules between DLLs/projects.

Are there acceptable/standard alternatives to resource files for this purpose? (e.g. the _ function in Python?)