The "correct" way of using multilingual support
- by Felipe Athayde
I just began working with ASP.NET and I'm trying to bring with me some coding standards I find healthy. Among such standards there is the multilingual support and the use of resources for easily handling future changes.
Back when I used to code desktop applications, every text had to be translated, so it was a common practice to have the language files for every languages I would want to offer to the customers. In those files I would map every single text, from button labels to error messages. In ASP.NET, with the help of Visual Studio, I have the resort of using the IDE to generate such Resource Files (from Tools - Generate Local Resource), but then I would have to fill my webpages with labels - at least that is what I've learned from articles and tutorials. However, such approach looks a bit odd and I'm tempted to guess it doesn't smell that good as well. Now to the question:
1) Should I keep every single text in my website as labels and manage its contents in the resource files? It looks/feels odd specially when considering a text with several paragraphs.
2) Whenever I add/remove something, e.g.: a button, to an aspx file I would have to add it to the resource file as well, because generating the resource file again would simply override all my previous changes to it. That doesn't feel like a reusable code at all for me. Any comment suggestion on this one?
Perhaps I got it all wrong from tutorials as it doesn't seem like a standardized matter - specially if it required recompiling the entire application whenever some change has to be done.
