• S. Somasegar (Somasegar’s WebLog) [English] [Japanese] [Simplified Chinese]
• Jason Zander (Jason Zander’s WebLog) [English] [Simplified Chinese]
• Scott Guthrie (ScottGu’s Blog) [English] [Simplified Chinese]
• Scott Hanselman (Scott Hanselman’s – Computer Zen) [English] [Simplified Chinese]
• Brian Harry (bharry’s WebLog) [English] [Simplified Chinese]
• Beth Massi (Beth Massi - Sharing the goodness that is VB) [English] [Simplified Chinese]

Those Chinese blogs will be updated regularly. Both Chinese and non-Chinese readers are welcome to visit the sites :)

By default, the Date format is controlled by the locale in your Control Panel. This will insure that the correct date format will be displayed to your user. Therefore you don’t have to worry about it.

As usual, you need to tweak and control our display. There are a couple of interesting means to adjust the date format.

 First, you can set the display to the long date format. This is accomplished by checking a checkbox in your display of while creating your date object. Check the below screenshot:

Second, if you need more control over the date format. You can add a computed field, possibly a string, and on the calculate string, define your specific format. Follow these steps:

1)      Create a computed property called “CreateDateDisplay”

2)      Handle the “Compute” method.

3)      Add your code, in the below example, I added code to use the US date formatting.

        partial void CreateDateDisplay_Compute(ref string result)

        {

            System.Globalization.CultureInfo cInfo;

            cInfo = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("en-US");

            result = CreateDate.Date.ToString("d",cInfo);

        }

Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (United States), Estonian, Finish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic, Serbia and Montenegro (Former)), Serbian (Latin, Serbia and Montenegro (Former)), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese

So for example, if you are using English VS LightSwitch 2011, you can produce applications that run in any of the above languages. You just need to set the culture of your application and your runtime is changed.

Follow these simple steps:

1)      In Solution Explorer, open the Application designer.

2)      In the Application Designer, stay on the General Properties tab.

3)      Expand the Culture drop-down list.

A list of available cultures will appear in the list.

4)      Click the culture that you want to use.

5)      You now need to re-build your solution to pick up the new culture resources.

a)      Goto the Build menu

b)      Select “Rebuild Solution”.

6)      After the Rebuild is complete for your solution, you can now run it and enjoy the runtime in the desired language.

In my example, I changed the culture to Malay.

This is a screenshot of the UI:

If you click on the Design Screen button, you can see more runtime items, check this screenshot:

I hope you enjoyed this short LightSwitch HowTo.

1. In the Table Design, go to the Properties.

2. Set the “Currency Code” to the desired code.

3. Set the “Symbol Mode” to “Currency Symbol”

WinForm application which takes two strings and concatenates them.

The first string is entered into the first text box and the second string is entered into the second text box and the result is displayed next to the 'Result' label.

For entering the Hindi letters, Hindi inscript keyboard was used. The following methods of inputting hindi input does not work well:
 

1. Hindi transliteration keyboard
2. Hindi typewriter
3. Hindi typewriter (akruti)
4. Hindi Remington keyboards

Now we will walk through the series of steps required to generate a coded UI test for this application.

Steps

1. In Visual Studio 2010, click on Test menu and choose New Test

 2. In the Add New Test dialog, choose Coded UI Test and click OK.

NOTE:- You can choose to create a Visual C# test project or a Visual Basic test project.

3. In the New Test Project dialog, change the Test Project name and click Create.

4. In the Generate Code for Coded UI Test dialog, choose Record actions, edit UI Map or add assertions

5. The Coded UI Test Builder will start up.

6. Click on Start Recording button to start the recorder.

Note: There is a slight delay when the recorder starts. Ensure that the button changes to the Pause Recording before recording test steps.

7. Now perform the desired test steps.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to test the concatenation of two hindi strings.

NOTE: Coded UI Test works on Web (IE 7 & 8), WinForms & WPF apps. I am choosing the above as an application which is straight forward and illustrates the point being made

The Test steps are

a. Launch the application Hindi concatenator

b. Type हग in the first text box

d. Type  तक in the second text box

e. Click 'Add' button

Note that a text description of actions will be shown in the Recorded Actions window. The Recorded Actions window can be pinned if you want to see the actions being recorded. It will become semi-transparent when you move focus away from it.

8. Click on the Generate Code button and change the name of the method to TestAdd.

9. Now drag the cross-hair and drop it on result field in the concatenator. A blue rectangle is drawn around the selected label control.

Click on the Add and Generate button to add this method to the project.

Click on the Add and Generate button to add this method to the project.

16. Close the Coded UI Test Builder by clicking on the X button.

17. The Coded UI Test is now opened within the Visual Studio IDE.

NOTE the following characteristics about the generated code.

a. The CodedUITest1 class is tagged with a Coded UI Test attribute.

b. The CodedUITetMethod1 method is tagged with a Test Method attribute.

c. in the CodedUITestMethod1, the methods we created are invoked.

18. Note the following in the Solution Explorer.

a. All required references for Coded UI Test are added automatically.

b. 5 files are added to the Test Project

i. CodedUITest1.cs - main Coded UI Test class, Test Methods and Assertions.

ii. UIMap.uitest – XML Representation of the UI Map (a container of UI Controls) and the recorded actions.

iii. UIMap.Designer.cs - Code generated for the UIMap

iv. UIMap.cs – empty file where UIMap customizations may be added.

iv. UserControls.cs - Specialized classes representing various UI Controls referenced in the Test.

19. Right-click inside the Coded UI Test Method and choose Run Tests

20. The code is compiled and then the test is run.

21. All actions recorded earlier will now be played back.

22. After the test run is completed, right-click on the Test Run and choose View Test Results Details.

Note:

References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mathew_aniyan/archive/2009/11/05/tutorial-coded-ui-test-beta2.aspx

The actual DateTime value is independent of the way it appears when you display it in your UI. Internally, all DateTime values are denoted as the total number of ticks that have elapsed since 12:00:00 midnight, January 1, 0001. The appearance of a DateTime value is the result of a formatting operation.

Reading Dates

First, you can initialize through the constructors, or by parsing the string representation of a date and time value. The Parse, ParseExact, TryParse, and TryParseExact methods all convert a string to its equivalent date and time value.

You can use the TryParse and TryParseExact methods to check if a particular string contains a valid representation of a DateTime value in addition to performing the conversion.

The following example uses the Parse method to parse an UmAlQura string and convert it to a DateTime value.

private static String ReadHijriDate(String InputStr)

{

         String OutStr= "";

         DateTime dt;

         System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo HijriDTFI;

         try

         {

         HijriDTFI = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("ar-SA", false).DateTimeFormat;

         HijriDTFI.Calendar = new System.Globalization.UmAlQuraCalendar();

         dt = DateTime.Parse(InputStr, HijriDTFI);

         OutStr = dt.Date.ToString("dddd, dd MMMM, yyyy");

         }

         catch (Exception ex)

         {

         MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);

         OutStr = "Error";

         }

         return OutStr;

}

Displaying Dates

The appearance of date values is dependent on the culture, international standards and application requirements. The DateTime offers a great deal of flexibility in formatting date and time values through the overloads of its ToString method.

 The default DateTime.ToString() method returns the string representation of a date and time value using the current culture's short date and long time pattern. However, you can display the dates in the different calendars that you need. For example, the below code displays the dateTime in a UmAlQura date, notice here that the range for the UmAlQura calendar is much less than the Gregorian calendar, therefore you need to fallback to the HijriCalendar. Check out this code:

private static String DisplayHijriDate(DateTime dt)

{

         String OutStr = "";

         System.Globalization.DateTimeFormatInfo HijriDTFI;

         try

  {

         //dt = Convert.ToDateTime(InputStr);

         HijriDTFI = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("ar-SA", false).DateTimeFormat;

         HijriDTFI.Calendar = new System.Globalization.UmAlQuraCalendar();

         if (dt > HijriDTFI.Calendar.MaxSupportedDateTime)

         {

                 //We fell back to Hijri calendar, when we reached UmAlQura Max limit

                 HijriDTFI.Calendar = new System.Globalization.HijriCalendar();

         }

         OutStr = dt.Date.ToString("dddd, dd MMMM, yyyy", HijriDTFI);

         }

         catch (Exception ex)

         {

                 MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);

                 OutStr = "Error";

         }

         return OutStr;

}

I hope you found this blog useful and demonstrated how to read and display date through the DateTime class.

XNA Game Studio also provides a robust platform to enable localization of game projects. You may refer here, if you wish to access a step-by-step guide and recommended practices to ensure a game project is localizable.

Wish this resource may be helpful to you. Enjoy it!

By definition, satellite assemblies do not contain code, except for that which is auto generated. Therefore, they cannot be executed as they are not in the main assembly. However, note that satellite assemblies are associated with a main assembly that usually contains default neutral resources (for example, en-US). A big benefit is that you can add support for a new culture or replace/update satellite assemblies without recompiling or replacing the application’s main assembly.

Resource files have the extension .resx and are stored in folders matching the culture. Once compiled, .resources files are created. These are binary representations of the .resx files. Once the satellite assembly is generated, the resources will be stored in a .dll file.

For example:

The ResourceManager class allows applications to load resources from the satellite assemblies, and the default behavior is that it does so according to the CurrentUICulture setting. Note that the culture can only be known at runtime. If the application cannot find the desired resources, the fallback process will find the appropriate resources by searching the hierarchy of cultures looking for an appropriate fallback resource that most closely matches the request.

You can use the Language property in the Windows Form designer to trigger the generation of non-default cultures via .resx files. For example:

To associate a culture with the default binary resource, you need to set the NeutralResourcesLanguageAttribute property in the AssemblyInfo file (this file is automatically generated and contains the build information for the project).                                                                                

To create satellite assemblies, use al.exe (Assembly Linker) to compile .resources files into satellite assemblies (Note: .resx, .resource files are generated by the IDE; al.exe generates the .dll file(s)).

You may also use MSBuild. If your application is configured to generate a neutral-language-resources satellite assembly, MSBuild will generate the main application assembly, as well as the neutral-language-resources satellite assembly that is required for localization.

Another alternative is to use resgen.exe, which gets installed with the Windows SDK, and does the following:

• Converts .txt or .restext files to .resources or .resx files
• Converts .resources files to text or .resx files
• Converts .resx files to text or .resources files

If your plan does not involve localization and you still want to embed resources (e.g. image files) into an assembly, set the Build Action property to "Embedded Resource" by

1. a.     Adding the image file by right-clicking in the Solution Explorer -> Add Existing Item
2. b.     In Properties, set the Build Action property to Embedded Resource

Follow these steps to compile satellite assemblies.

During deployment, the satellite assemblies will be placed in folders matching the name of the culture containing the assembly.

I hope this gives you a fair explanation of what satellite assemblies are, how they are used, and when they should be used. In a later post, I will show how to access the resources in the satellite assemblies.

Support for East Asian languages

At Mix 11, support for East Asian languages was announced. This has come about by a modified implementation of the Metro design layout. To accommodate the bigger size of East Asian fonts, the Windows Phone design team is adopting a vertical text layout to reduce the amount of text clipping that would occur more frequently (than it already does). The vertical text will not be limited to just the date and time on the lock screen but will also be featured in hubs (panoramas) and other native apps

Market place expansion

Also, the app creation market will expand from the existing 16 to 35 countries.

Additionally, Windows Phone Marketplace will support app submission in China, Israel and Luxembourg. A web Marketplace has also been announced.

Links

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2011/05/24/developer-news-beta-mango-tools-available-today.aspx

http://www.liveside.net/2011/05/06/more-on-east-asian-language-support-on-windows-phone-7-5-mango

Since our blog mainly focuses on the international features of Microsoft products, I started to search for international features of WebMatrix. I didn’t find much, so I thought that this is a good topic for our blog.

So far, Microsoft has shipped WebMatrix in the following UI languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Polish, Turkish and Brazilian Portuguese.

When you download WebMatrix you are directed to Web Hosting gallery; this is the same for all UI languages of Webmatrix. However, there are tools available for finding hosting providers based on geography or currency. You can Bing to find your favorite tool. :)

When you create a new website based on online template, the templates’ language depends on the WebMatrix UI language. For example, in Japanese UI will you have Japanese templates.

The same framework methods that are available to you in MVC or Web Forms applications are also available in ASP.NET Web Pages.  This includes all of the classes for resource loading and all of the classes in the System.Globalization namespace.

You can change the encoding of a response programmatically in the same way you would in Web Forms.  The following code works in both frameworks:

          Response.ContentEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("GB18030");

The only major feature introduced is a simple way to set Culture and UICulture in a simplified format.  The following code will set the Culture and UICulture on the thread that generates the response to fr-FR and fr, respectively:

      @{

         Culture = "fr-FR";

         UICulture = "fr";

     }

Similarly, if you want the same behavior that the Culture=”Auto” setting on the Page directive gives you in ASP.NET, you can write:

      @{

         Culture = "Auto";

         UICulture = "Auto";

     }

If you are a PHP user, I’m not an expert but I assume that all the international features would also follow in the same manner. 

 I need to thank the Web Platform and Tools team’s Clay Compton for helping me in this post.  :)