Globalization Support in

Microsoft .NET Framework

François LigerProgram 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.Data System.Xml

System.Web

Globalization

Diagnostics

Configuration

Collections

Resources

Reflection

Net

IO

Threading

Text

ServiceProcess

Security

Design

ADO

SQLTypes

SQL

XPath

XSLT

RuntimeInteropServices

Remoting

Serialization

Serialization

Configuration SessionState

Caching Security

ServicesDescription

Discovery

Protocols

UIHtmlControls

WebControls

System.Drawing

Imaging

Drawing2DTextPrinting

System.WinForms

Design ComponentModel

.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 12,000.00 vs. 12.000,00

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

<%@Page ResponseEncoding=“utf-8” %>

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:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/net http://www.GotDotNet.com

General info on globalization: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev

Questions ?