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Monday, January 14, 2008

Globalization and Localization in .NET

Localization means "process of translating resources for a specific culture", and
Globalization means "process of designing applications that can adapt to different cultures".

Proper Globalization: - Your Application should be able to Accept, Verify, and Display All global kind of data; It should well also be able to operate over this Data, accordingly. We will discuss more about this "Accordingly operations over diff. culture data".
Localizability and Localization: - Localizability stands for clearly separating the components of culture based Operations regarding the user interface, and other operations from the executable code.

The namespaces involved in creation of globalize, localizing applications are
System.Globalization
System.Resources
System.Text
The utmost basic entity in this scenario is Culture.
The Culture information (usually called CultureInfo) includes the Language, Country/region, Calendar, Formats of Date, Currency, number System, And Sorting Order.
This all information is defined inside CultureInfo class, which is inside the System.Globalization namespace.

The Invariant Culture is culture / language insensitive, we can refer to it by empty string "". Or by it's Culture Identifier 0x007F. The Language is English by default but it's not associated with any country, although using it may lead to a wrong sort order (but it's very rare). When you don't specify a culture, it's by default Invariant.

Neutral Culture is only associated with language but not country, while Specific Culture is associated with the language as well as the country and region.

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