Globalization Support in Microsoft 'NET Framework

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Globalization Support in Microsoft .NET
Framework

• François Liger
• Program Manager
• Microsoft Corporation

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What is .NET Framework?

• .NET is Microsoft's platform for building,
  deploying, operating and integrating XML Web
  services.
• Rich XML, standard protocols, stateless
• Cross-language development
• Common language runtime
• Common type system for all languages
• Rich runtime environment
• Rich class libraries (.NET Framework)
• Base class libraries, ADO.NET and XML
• Windows Forms for rich, Win32 applications
• Web application platform ASP.NET
• Easier to deploy, run, maintain applications
• For components, versioning, availability

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Key Terms (as used in this talk)

• Globalization (a.k.a. Internationalization)
• Core application handles international data
• Character encodings
• Date and time, numeric, currency formats
• Market adaptation
• Additional functionality for a given market
• Localization translation
• Localizable ready for translation
• Resources
• Application elements (error messages, UI) to be
  translated in localized versions

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Why include international support in the
Framework ?

• Consistency
• .NET Framework is Unicode internally
• .NET Framework carries NLS classes, sorting
  tables
• Consistent results on Windows XP, Windows 2000,
  Windows NT 4, Windows Millennium, Windows 98
• Note there are a few limitations on down-level
  Unicode support
• Underlying operating system limitations
• Windows Code pages
• File I/O

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.NET Framework Namespace
System.Web
System.WinForms
Services
UI
Design
ComponentModel
Description
HtmlControls
Discovery
WebControls
Protocols
System.Drawing
Caching
Security
Drawing2D
Printing
Text
Configuration
SessionState
Imaging
System.Data
System.Xml
ADO
SQL
XSLT
Serialization
Design
SQLTypes
XPath
System
Collections
IO
Security
Runtime
InteropServices
Configuration
Net
ServiceProcess
Remoting
Diagnostics
Reflection
Text
Serialization
Globalization
Resources
Threading
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System.Globalization Namespace

• Includes classes for functionality such as
• Culture-aware string comparison
• AABC vs. ABCC (ordinal codepoint values)
• Coté vs. Côte (culture dependent)
• Date Time formatting
• yy/mm/dd vs. dd/mm/yy
• Numeric formatting
• 12,000.00 vs. 12.000,00
• Calendars
• Gregorian and non-Gregorian
• Starting point the CultureInfo class

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CultureInfo

• Provider of cultural preferences
• Two roles
• CurrentCulture
• Date and number formatting
• String comparison and casing
• CurrentUICulture
• Resource selection for user interface
• Can be controlled on a per thread basis
• RFC 1766 derived hierarchy
• CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture
• Optional mapping from neutral to specific

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CultureInfo

• Cultural preferences provider
• Invariant culture
• culture-invariant default
• Neutral culture
• Based on language
• Resource only
• No formatting
• CurrentUICulture only
• Specific culture
• Based on language region
• Resource Formatting specifics
• CurrentCulture CurrentUICulture

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CultureInfo and related classes Demo
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How to Set Culture and UICulture

• Implicitly
• CurrentUICulture
• Picked up from GetUserDefaultUILanguage
• On Windows XP and Windows 2000 MUI SKUs, this
  setting can be set by end-user
• Otherwise, set from OS resources language
• CurrentCulture
• Picked up from GetUserDefaultLCID
• Affected by changes to
• Control Panel Regional Options Set Locale

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How to Set CurrentCulture, CurrentUICulture

• Explicitly
• Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture new
  CultureInfo(ja)
• Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture new
  CultureInfo(ja-JP)
• Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture
  CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(Request.UserLang
  uages(0))
• Within an individual API that takes a culture
• Str DateTime.Now.ToString(cultureInfo)

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What if I dont want formatting to change by
culture?

• For UI, prefer culture-sensitive formatting
• However, for wire-transfer, database storage, you
  may want stable, culture-unrelated format, such
  as
• ,.
• dd MMMM yyyy HHmmss GMT
• international currency symbol
• Use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture

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Culture-aware Classes

• Any API which takes a culture, or an
  IFormatProvider
• Culture-sensitive by default
• Examples
• System.Globalization.CompareInfo
• System.Globalization.StringInfo
• System.Globalization.Calendar
• System.Resources
• System.DateTime
• System.String

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Culture-aware Classes

• Calendar classes
• Includes support for
• Gregorian Calendar
• Hebrew Calendar
• Hijiri Calendar
• Japanese Calendar
• Julian Calendar
• Korean Calendar
• Taiwan Calendar
• Thai Buddhist Calendar
• Base Calendar class from which custom calendars
  can be derived

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Culture-aware Classes

• DateTime
• Provides methods that enable culture-sensitive
  operations on a DateTime.
• Use the DateTimeFormatInfo Class to format and
  display a DateTime based on culture.
• DateTimeFormatInfo
• Defines how DateTime values are formatted and
  displayed, depending on the culture.

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Culture-aware Classes

• NumberFormatInfo
• Defines how currency, decimal separator and other
  numeric symbols are formatted and displayed based
  on culture

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Culture-aware Classes

• CompareInfo
• Provides a set of methods that can be used to
  perfomr culture-sensitive string comparisons
• The CultureInfo class has a CompareInfo property
  that is an instance of the CompareInfo class
• The String.Compare method uses the information in
  the CultureInfo.CompareInfo property to compare
  strings

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Unicode support

• Unicode everywhere
• Unicode internally
• UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoding classes
• String operations
• Surrogates Combining characters support
• Character type information
• Based on Unicode 3.0 tables
• Unicode category enumeration
• CultureInfo data
• Caveats
• OS dependent operations
• Controls support
• File System

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ASP.NET And International

• ASP.NET delivers improved support for
  international application development
• Can leverage .NET Framework base classes
• System.Globalization
• System.Text (encodings)
• System.Resources
• Can separate resources from source code
• Unicode-enabled
• More options for specifying encoding

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ASP.NET setting culture and encoding

• Programmatically
• Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture .
• In a Page directive
• lt_at_Page ResponseEncodingutf-8 gt
• In a Configuration file (web.config)
• Per application or per machine
• ltglobalization
• culturede-DE
• fileEncodingutf-8 /gt
• The most specific setting has precedence
• Programmatic overrides Page Directive,
• Page Directive overrides Configuration file

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ASP.NET Demo
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Additional References

• Documentation
• .NET Framework SDK
• Developing World-Ready Applications
• Tutorials
• Samples
• Visual Studio
• Visual Studio.NET\Visual Basic and
  VisualC\Globalizing and Localizing\Walkthroughs
• General info on .NET Framework
• http//msdn.microsoft.com/net
• http//www.GotDotNet.com
• General info on globalization
• http//www.microsoft.com/globaldev

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Questions ?