Ok enough theory. To start using the internationalization
stuff lets start with a simple Form.
Open the Visual
Studio IDE. And Start a Windows Forms project. And then create a simple Form.
Add some labels and buttons and set their captions. Once you do that and finish
the initial creation of the form, go to the properties pane and change the
Localizable property to true and
assign the desired value in the Language property. The Visual Studio designer
will save the changes in additional resource files whose names will look like
<FormName>.<culture>.resx
Once you finish the texts, sizes, positions for the first
culture and save it. The IDE creates the resource file for that culture. If you
want to create a resource file for another language just change the Form
property and assign the text for this new language.
You can not only assign personalized translations for each
region but also the position and size of components. This is useful because in
some languages the buttons might need to be bigger because the labels could be
bigger.
All this work is supported by the .NET resource managers. System.Resources.ResourceManager class.
I recommend you also using String Resource Tools like the
ones at: http://www.codeplex.com/ResourceRefactoring
These tools makes it even easier the task of moving all your
strings to resource files:
