Is there any performance difference in using .resx file and satellite assembly?

Question

Which is the best way to go forward while building a localized aspx web application, .resx files of satellite assemblies? Is there any performance comparisons available any where on web?

Answer 1

Well I don't know if the comparison is valid..

ResX is a storage format for storing resources in XML. It gets compiled to a binary form (.resources) with the resgen tool before it gets embedded (if so specified) into the assembly.

Satellite assembly is a diff/delta of your main assembly resources and your localized resources. So if you have a Strings.resx with 100 strings in MainAssembly.dll of which 10 change in French Canadian Culture, you should have a MainAssembly.resources.dll (satellite assembly) containing just those 10 strings in the fr-CA subdirectory of the DLL folder. When you query for a string resource using a ResourceManager, it takes into account current culture. If fr-CA, it will first look for the string in the satellite assembly in the fr-CA folder, if not found it will fall back to the resources in the DLL itself and return that. The mechanism is to search for it in the following order always.

  - [fr-CA subfolder]\MyAssembly.resources.dll 
  - [fr subfolder]\MyAssembly.resources.dll 
  - DLL itself

For more details, check out http://www.dotneti18n.com/ or the Resources chapter of 'Programming WPF'