12 Building world-ready applications

 

This chapter covers

  • Making your application world-ready
  • Performing a localizability review
  • Localizing your application

When I say world-ready, I don’t mean it in the sense of "Hello, World!", and I don’t mean that your application is ready to be released to production. Before making an application available to the world, consider that most of the world doesn’t speak your language. Even if your application is a web API used as a backend service or a library in a NuGet package for use in other applications, anything that can be exposed to an end user should be in a form that the user can understand. Dates, time zones, languages, measurements, and even sorting order depend on region and culture.

.NET includes powerful capabilities for internationalizing applications. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the recommended process for internationalization. We’ll disambiguate the terms localization, globalization, and internationalization. (World-ready is a Microsoft term to describe the whole process.) We’ll also explore the techniques and APIs for localization in .NET, beginning with an example application.

12.1 Creating the sample application

12.2 Getting resource strings

12.3 Adding resource languages

12.4 ASP.NET Core’s built-in culture support

12.5 Internationalization

12.5.1 Globalization

12.5.2 Localizability review

12.5.3 Testing right-to-left languages

12.5.4 Other considerations for globalization

Summary