Globalization Support in Microsoft.NET Framework François Liger Program Manager Microsoft Corporation

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

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

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

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

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, vs ,00 Calendars  Gregorian and non-Gregorian  Starting point : the CultureInfo class

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

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 invariant de de-AT de-CH de-DE de-LI de-LU en

CultureInfo and related classes Demo

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

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.UserLanguages(0))  Within an individual API that takes a culture Str = DateTime.Now.ToString(cultureInfo);

What if I don’t 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 HH:mm:ss GMT international currency symbol  Use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture

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

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

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.

Culture-aware Classes  NumberFormatInfo Defines how currency, decimal separator and other numeric symbols are formatted and displayed based on culture

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

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

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

ASP.NET setting culture and encoding:  Programmatically Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture =……….  In a Page directive  In a Configuration file (web.config) Per application or per machine <globalization culture=“de-DE” fileEncoding=“utf-8” /> The most specific setting has precedence :  Programmatic overrides Page Directive,  Page Directive overrides Configuration file

ASP.NET Demo

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:  General info on globalization:

Questions ?