I have thought of three approaches to create and maintain resources in .Net projects for WinForms using Visual Studio 2008. (I am sure there should be more than three ways.) I need to decide on one before starting to implement internationalization for our product.

• Have individual sets of resource files (resx) for each windows form or piece of UI (a custom control) in each .net project. These are auto generated by Visual Studio when Localizable property is set to true in the form or control properties.
• Have one resource file per .net project. This is added manually and updated manually with the resource strings and messages.
• Have one resource manager project that has resources for all the components for a set of .net projects.

Personally, I do not like the first approach as it creates numerous resources files. The only advantage we get in this approach is that we do not need to set text in UI elements manually.

I like second and third approach as they are easy to maintain and there is only one set of resources that you need to handle. So no duplication of strings and messages. Easy for the translators also.

What are your thoughts? Please share.