How to use resources in VC++?

Question

I am using VC 9 and I want to support Russian language for my application. I even created Russian resource strings. But my system has Russian Language setting. If it is not there every character displays junk (its code page is 1251). I also made DLL from Russian resource file. If I run that DLL in application from installed location, it works fine. But when I change computer setting to English and run that DLL from appilcation, dialog and message box shows junk character. But shouldn't application read from DLL, not from computer language setting? Here I am facing problem how to make a language independent DLL. Any code or setting for this?

Answer 1

By far the easiest solution is to stick to Unicode.

Windows is Unicode internally. (Almost) Every API function exists in two variants, FooA and FooW. THe FooA variant converts char's to wchar_t's before calling FooW. The exact conversion is defined by the code page.

Now, if you use Unicode, there is no such conversion, and no code page. If the user enters ж (U+0436, it is stored as wchar_t(0x0436) and never converted. If your resource contains ж in Unicode, it too is not converted.

Answer 2

If the strings you want to display cannot be represented in the system code page, the only solution is Unicode.