globalization

Floating Point Number parsing: Is there a Catch All algorithm?

One of the fun parts of multi-cultural programming are numbers formats. Americans use 10,000.50, Germans use 10.000,50, French use 10 000,50 etc. My first approach would be: Take the string, parse it backwards, until I encounter a separator and use this as my decimal separator. The obvious flaw with that: 10.000 would be interpreted as ...

Localising date format descriptors

What is the best way to localise a date format descriptor? As anyone from a culture which does not use the mm/dd/yyyy format knows, it is annoying to have to enter dates in this format. The .NET framework provides some very good localisation support, so it's trivial to parse dates according to the users culture, but you often want to al...

Handling timezones in storage?

Store everything in GMT? Store everything the way it was entered with an embedded offset? Do the math everytime you render? Display relative Times "1 minutes ago"? ...

What is the "best" way to store international addresses in a database?

What is the "best" way to store international addresses in a database? Answer in the form of a schema and an explanation of the reasons why you chose to normalize (or not) the way you did. Also explain why you chose the type and length of each field. Note: You decide what fields you think are necessary. ...

Globalization architecture

I need to store products for an e-commerce solution in a database. Each product should have descriptive information, such as name, description etc. I need any product to be localized to x number of languages. What I've done so far, is to make any column that should be localized and nvarchar(MAX) and then i store an XML string like this...

What do I need to know to globalize an asp.net application?

I'm writing an asp.net application that will need to be localized to several regions other than North America. What do I need to do to prepare for this globalization? What are your top 1 to 2 resources for learning how to write a world ready application. ...

Parsing exact dates in C# shouldn't force you to create an IFormatProvider

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but parsing a yyyy/MM/dd (or other specific formats) dates in C# should be as easy as DateTime.ParseExact(theDate, "yyyy/MM/dd"); but no, C# forces you to create an IFormatProvider. Is there an app.config friendly way of setting this so I don't need to do this each time? DateTime.ParseExact(t...

What is the best way to localize a WPF application, sans LocBAML?

There seems to be no good way to localize a WPF application. MSDN seems to think that littering my XAML with x:Uid's, generating CSV files, and then generating new assemblies (using their sample code!) is the answer. Worse, this process doesn't address how to localize images, binary blobs (say, PDF files), or strings that are embedded ...

How to make my .NET app support different languages

Hi, The application I'm writing is almost complete and I'd like people who speak different languages to use it. I'm not sure where to start, what's the difference between globalisation and culture in regards to programming? How does one take uncommon phrases such as "this application was built to do this and that" instead of File, Ope...

How can I detect the encoding/codepage of a text file

In our application, we receive text files (.txt, .csv, etc.) from diverse sources. When reading, these files sometimes contain garbage, because the files where created in a different/unknown codepage. Is there a way to (automatically) detect the codepage of a text file? (I use .Net / C#). The detectEncodingFromByteOrderMarks, on the ...

Why is software support for Bidirectional text (Hebrew,Arabic) so poor?

While most operating systems and web browsers have very good support for bidirectional text such as Hebrew and Arabic, most commercial and open-source software does not: Most text editors, besides the original notepad and the visual studio editor, does a very poor job. (And I tried dozens of them). I could not find any file compare too...

How Do You Write Code That Is Safe for UTF-8?

We have a set of applications that were developed for the ASCII character set. Now, we're trying to install it in Iceland, and are running into problems where the Icelandic characters are getting screwed up. We are working through our issues, but I was wondering: Is there a good "guide" out there for writing C++ code that is designed ...

Tracking Globalization progress

With our next major release we are looking to globalize our ASP.Net application and I was asked to think of a way to keep track of what code has been already worked on in this effort. My thought was to use a custom Attribute and place it on all classes that have been "fixed". What do you think? Does anyone have a better idea? ...

How to localize ASP .Net MVC application?

What would be best practice to localize your ASP .Net MVC application ? I would like to cover two situations: one application deployment in IIS which would handle multiple languages one language / application deployment. In first situation should you go with somekind of view based thing like, ~/View/EN, ~/View/FI, ~/View/SWE or some...

Prevent exception messages from being translated into the user's language?

How do I make my application always use English when displaying win32/.net exceptions messages? I got this message, it looks like someone used babelfish to translate it (it's Swedish): "System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Programmet kunde inte starta eftersom programmets sida-vid-sidakonfiguration är felaktig." Extremely unhelpful, a...

Globalizing runtime generated assemblies

Background A project installs some files that contain all the elements to define a UserControl - some user source, a CodeCompileUnit for designer code, and a resx file. At runtime, these files are compiled into an assembly and the classes are consumed by our main application (the assembly is only updated when necessary). Question The ...

Problems with globalization when using Oracle collections with thin JDBC

To summarise the issue: Retrieving strings in Java 1.5 (JDBC) works fine when the DB encoding is Western ISO 8859-2 When switching to an Eastern European ISO (e.g. ISO 8859-5), all the normal JDBC string conversions work, except the ones involving Oracle collections, e.g. nested tables of objects. Instead of proper strings, even simple...

Get all the supported Cultures from a satellite assembly

Hi, I am using a satellite assembly to hold all the localization resources in a C# application. What I need to do is create a menu in the GUI with all the available languages that exists for the application. Is there any way to get information dynamically? ...

Convert CSV file or Excel spreadsheet to RESX File

I am looking for a solution or recommendation to a problem I am having. I have a bunch of ASPX pages that will be localized and have a bunch of text that needs to be supported in 6 languages. The people doing the translation will not have access to Visual Studio and the likely easiest tool is Excel. If we use Excel or even export to C...

.NET RegionInfo class

When I try to create a new RegionInfo with certain ISO 3166 country codes ("BD" for Bangladesh, "SO" for Somalia, "LK" for Sri Lanka), I get an ArgumentException that says it's not recognized. What's the deal? The Intellisense of RegionInfo(string) says it conforms to ISO 3166, but these country/region codes are not supported? I don't...