Globalizing and Localizing Applications

If you plan on distributing your application to an international audience, there are a number of things you'll need to keep in mind during the design and development phases. Even if you don't have such plans, a small effort up front can make things considerably easier should your plans change in future versions of your application. Services built into the .NET Framework make it easy to develop a single application that can adapt to different locales using managed development with Visual Studio.

Visual Studio was designed from the start to make developing for an international audience easy by taking advantage of services built into the .NET Framework. The following pages will help introduce you to the internationalization features built into Visual Studio.

In This Section

• Introduction to International Applications Based on the .NET Framework
  Introduces the concepts related to developing software for an international market using Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.

• Encoding and Localization
  Provides links to pages about how to address globalization, localizability, and localization requirements.

• Localizing Applications
  Provides links to pages about customizing applications for a given culture.

• Globalizing Applications
  Provides links to pages about creating applications that support multiple cultures.

• Bi-directional Language Features in Visual Studio
  Discusses the bi-directional features in Visual Studio, which support Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, and other languages that are written right-to-left.

Related Sections

• Deployment and Localization
  Describes deployment tools in Visual Studio that allow you to distribute multiple versions of your application for different locales.

• Best Practices for Developing World-Ready Applications
  Provides background information on programming for an international audience.

• .NET Framework Class Library Overview
  Introduces the classes, interfaces, and value types that expedite and optimize the development process and provide access to system functionality.

• Globalization and Localization Namespaces in Visual Studio
  Lists the major namespaces for this area and provides links to .NET Framework reference pages about the types (classes, structures, enumerations, delegates, and interfaces) in the namespaces, as well as links to pages about using them in Visual Studio applications.

• System.Globalization
  Points out the classes in this namespace, which define culture-related information, including the language, the country/region, the calendars in use, the format patterns for dates, currency and numbers, and the sort order for strings.

• System.Resources
  Points out the classes and interfaces in this namespace, which allows developers to create, store, and manage various culture-specific resources used in an application.

• Deciding Which Technologies and Tools To Use
  Provides a graphical, linked guide to decisions about designing your application.