Terminology

The term internationalization is an umbrella term for the process of presenting an application in multiple languages. The terms internationalization, globalization, and localization are sometimes used interchangeably, yet they have different meanings.

Globalization describes engineering an application so that it does not have cultural preconceptions. For example, in the United States, dates are presented using the convention month/day/year, whereas in the United Kingdom and other countries, they are shown using the convention day/month/year. Fortunately, for developers working with .NET, Microsoft provides considerable infrastructure for provisioning for globalization.

Localizability describes the capacity of an application to have its resources replaced at runtime with culturally specific resources. Localization is the process of providing the sets of culturally specific resources. Such resources may include strings, icons, images, and sound files.

This chapter focuses on localizability.

The primary means for implementing localizability in Windows Phone XAML apps is through the use of resx files. Although the main ingredients exist in the Windows Phone SDK for localizability, there are techniques demonstrated in this chapter that improve compatibility with resx files and, in particular, enable them to be used with the XAML data-binding infrastructure. This allows the UI to respond to culture settings changes at runtime, something that the Windows Phone SDK does not provide out of the box.