Programmatic way to get all the available languages (in satellite assemblies)

Question

I'm designing a multilingual application using .resx files.

I have a few files like GlobalStrings.resx, GlobalStrings.es.resx, GlobalStrings.en.resx, etc. When I want to use this, I just need to set Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.

The problem: I have a combobox with all the available languages, but I'm loading this manually:

comboLanguage.Items.Add(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en"));
comboLanguage.Items.Add(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("es"));

I've tried with

cmbLanguage.Items.AddRange(CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.UserCustomCulture));

without any success. Also tried with all the elements in CultureTypes, but I'm only getting a big list with a lot more languages that I'm not using, or an empty list.

Is there any way to get only the supported languages?

Answer 1

I'm not sure about getting the languages, maybe you can scan your installation folder for dll-files, but setting your language to an unsupported language should not be a problem.

.NET will fallback to the culture neutral resources if no culture specific files can be found so you can safely select unsupported languages.

As long as you control the application yourself you could just store the available languages in a application setting somewhere. Just a comma-separated string with the culture names should suffice: "en, es"

Answer 2

Using what Rune Grimstad said I end up with this:

string executablePath = Path.GetDirectoryName(Application.ExecutablePath);
string[] directories = Directory.GetDirectories(executablePath);
foreach (string s in directories)
{
    try
    {
        DirectoryInfo langDirectory = new DirectoryInfo(s);
        cmbLanguage.Items.Add(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo(langDirectory.Name));
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {

    }
}

or another way

int pathLenght = executablePath.Length + 1;
foreach (string s in directories)
{
    try
    {
        cmbLanguage.Items.Add(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo(s.Remove(0, pathLenght)));
    }
    catch (Exception)
    {

    }
}

I still don't think that this is a good idea ...