Building International Applications with Visual Studio.NET Achim Ruopp International Program Manager Microsoft Corporation

Overview Unicode support Development Environment Compilers Forms package i18n support International support for Windows Forms International support for Web Forms Miscellaneous International support for XML Web Services New international support for native C++ applications International support for Deployment References/Questions

Unicode support - Development Environment the development environment is Unicode- enabled with a few exceptions: resource editor for Win32 resources some debugger dialogs some wizards the source code editor allows the editing of all scripts including complex scripts uses font linking to render characters outside the current font

Unicode support - Compilers Visual Basic.NET, Visual C ♯.NET and Visual JScript.NET all of them use Unicode-encoded source code (UTF-16) as input automatic conversion from a range of different character encodings: byte-order-mark at the start of the file for detecting UTF-forms /codepage compiler option for Visual C ♯.NET and Visual JScript.NET

Unicode support – Compilers (cont.) Unicode identifiers syntax follows the proposals described in Unicode UAX#15, Annex7 (part of Unicode 3.0) to be standardized in the Common Language Infrastructure submitted to ECMA TC39 Managed Extensions for C++ exception: still using Windows codepages (configurable) and ASCII identifiers

International support for Windows Forms Windows Forms are Unicode forms on all Windows platforms (some small limitations with legacy controls on Windows 98 and Windows ME) Windows Forms have a font linking mechanism Windows Forms support bi-directional layout and complex scripts rendering culture-aware controls such as DateTime picker and Calendar

Windows Forms – localization management in the designer Windows Forms provide localization support: every form has a Localizable property Localizable property set to True: the project system automatically keeps track of different language versions of a form builds the different language forms into satellite assemblies the resource format used is an XML format (RESX) that gets compiled into a binary format

Windows Forms – external localization any XML localization tool can be used the.NET Development Platform SDK contains a standalone visual editing tool: WinRes we are working with 3 rd parties to get localization tools enabled for the new resource formats (Lionbridge)

Demo calling an internationalized XML Web Service localization support in Windows Forms

International support for Web Forms the character encoding for requests, responses and the ASP.NET files is configurable the default request and response encodings are UTF-8 culture-aware controls such as Calendar

Web Forms - Localization the Web Forms designer fully supports flow-layout of ASP.NET pages the RESX resource format can be used for string resources is supported by the project system in the development environment

Demo setting culture and UI culture according to browser preferences globalization support of Web controls localization support in Web Forms

International support for XML Web Services based on standard efforts SOAP and UDDI SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) based on XML and HTTP globalized data types UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) based on SOAP version 2.0 introduced improvements for i18n Visual Studio.NET contains support to easily consume, produce and debug XML Web Services

New international support for native C++ applications MFC and ATL libraries support the new Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU) for Windows 98 and Windows ME the MFC application wizard provides templates for 9 different languages ATL Server supports the creation of Unicode ISAPI Web applications and provides locale support in conjunction with the C runtime

International support for Deployment Visual Studio Deployment projects allow you to create deployment projects in nine languages, including: English German French Italian Spanish Japanese Korean Chinese (simplified and traditional)

References Visual Studio documentation: Visual Studio.NET\Visual Basic and Visual C#\Globalizing and Localizing session “Building International Applications with Microsoft.NET Framework - Globalization” session “Building International Applications with Microsoft.NET Framework - Localization” Microsoft Layer for Unicode: contained in the July 2001 Platform SDK setuplauncher.asp - see also a session related to that at this conference setuplauncher.asp

References - continued W3C XML Protocol Activity UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration)

Questions?