| sly's profileSilverlight and Internat...PhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
Silverlight and International ThoughtsXAML on Safari! 11/18/2009 Silverlight 4 add Bidi supportThis is short post to show today that the silverlight 4 beta now supports Bidi http://www.silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/bidi-right-to-left/
This was a major internatioal feature request and tim has done a great introduction video. I played with this and seems pretty solid.
Unfortunately we still dont have any support for indic complex scripts as yet. I hope to do bidi sample over the weekend. 8/22/2009 Binding to Server based Resx Files in Silverlight 3
In Silverlight you can easily bind to compiled resx files, and the translations are baked into your xap as resourse dlls. In the majority of cases this is fine, as translations don’t change very often unless the UI changes which mean re-translation and redeploying anyway. Editorial Content If you have content, that needs to be changed frequently, you should use RIA Services or WCF that binds some editorial section that is not locked in your regular UI strings. Examples of this would be : Special Offers, promotions etc…. The translator would update your Content Management System and translate a default English text or promote something specific to that market. Eg: NFL tickets for US and Rugby Tickets for France. Then your RIA or WCF would poll this content from your CMS system each time your Silverlight application page loads for that market. This way the core translations are still baked into app but you have flexibility, to update certain parts of the UI dynamically. Code for this is pretty standard RIA services and is out of scope for this article. I may post a sample if people are interested. Server based Resx Under some circumstances a mixture of core UI and editorial content is not flexible enough. You may not want all your translation compiled into one mega xap or use MEF for dynamic resource loading, but keep them uncompiled on the server side until user requests a different language. In the example project below, I use a English resx with no code generation and stored as static resource. When the page loads it reads the local resx in the xap and creates strongly typed dynamic object of the dictionary using reflection. We wrap this in the LocStrings class that implements inotifypropertychanged interface to allow dynamic loc string binding. When the user selects a different culture in the dropdown the we make a request to the server get the resx. We then set the contents to LocStrings and update the thread culture. Possible uses include: - Reuse translations from your aspx site - Add new languages dynamically ViewBox in Localization In reading a SVG localization article I noticed developers sometime need some way to update fontsize based on the character length of a translation in some . Part of the Silverlight Toolkit contains a control called viewbox. A viewbox in WPF or Silverlight is a layout control that scale transforms it contents to fit the dimensions of it container. This should be used sparing and instead you grid that expands to the size on the content and translations using Textwrapping and scrollviewers.
Code: http://cid-289eaf995528b9fd.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/ServerResx.zip Demo: http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/6655/ServerResX/iframe.html 7/14/2009 Silverlight 3 Intl ImprovementsAs you aware by now Silverlight 3 is now available on http://microsoft.com/silverlight
Below is a list of international features that have seen updated in this release.
1. Comprehensive documentation on localization : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc838238(VS.95).aspx 2. Local Font support including Cambria and Segoe UI http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd547542(VS.95).aspx 3. ClearType support (Tip: Greatly improved but use native resolution) 4. Merged Dictionary Support 5. Element to Element Binding 6. Bug fixs - Improved support for asian cultures on XP, thai input issue
Im still waiting patiently for the localized runtimes and tools but that is generally very quick after the main launch.
Anyway below is a sample enables updating UI strings in realtime without re-starting your application.
This uses a singleton class to the PublicResxFileCodeGenerator that implements iNotifyProperyChanged
public class LocStrings :INotifyPropertyChanged { // INotifyPropertyChanged plumbing public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void NotifyChange(String name) { if (PropertyChanged != null) PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name)); } //public constructor public LocStrings() { } // PublicResXFileCodeGenerator private static loc.Strings lStrings = new loc.Strings(); public loc.Strings LStrings { get { return lStrings; } set { NotifyChange("LStrings");} } }
private void ComboBox_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e) { ComboBox langddl = sender as ComboBox; string selectedLang = (langddl.SelectedItem as ComboBoxItem).Content.ToString(); ; Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo(selectedLang); Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo(selectedLang); ((LocStrings)this.Resources["LStrings"]).LStrings = new SL3Loc.loc.Strings(); }
Demo: http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/6655/SL3loc/iframe.html Code: http://cid-2b248d261d0e0035.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/SL3Loc.zip
BTW: SilverlightRTL updated their excellent code to work on SL3 http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/alex_golesh/archive/2009/07/10/silverlight-3-hebrew-and-arabic-support.aspx
11/16/2008 LocWebService: Only download resources per UserControl
1. Introduction In this sample I will show how bind text elements that load localization resources from the server side resx file via a WCF service in silverlight 2.0. Advantages:
Disadvantages:
2. UserControl local resources configuration I first created two helper class's to assist in design time binding called LocItem and LocCollection LocItem implements the INotifyPropertyChanged class and contains two properties ItemName and ItemValue. This will enable us to dynamically update a localizable string at runtime. We then need to a LocItem for every localizable string we add it to our UserControl Resources per control or page. LocCollection is another helper class based from Silverlight Control Toolkit ObjectCollection This is a enumerable collection of our loc strings on a page, that get over the limitation that ResourceDictionary does not implement iEnumerable. Both these are instantiated in markup and then bound to your localizable element. <UserControl.Resources>
</UserControl.Resources> ...
3. WCF Service When the control initializes we make a WCF request to get all translations in our LocCollection. On the server side we lookup our server side resx file for each requested string and wrap it in a XDocument of LocString . Once the WCF loaded event fires we then update the ItemValue our individual LocItems to display the localizable strings.
4. Code This is a pretty crude sample but you could wrap this functionality in asp.net style base page to make it scale cleaner. Download: LocWebService.zip 10/26/2008 SL 2.0 localization on-demand sample updatedOverview Updated To fix bugs on english code to check for culture installed and to fallback to english if culture not available This is a more advanced sample showing concepts I showed beta 2 samples and integrated into Silverlight 2.0 RTW project. Im not going over each part as this has already been detailed in earlier posts.
Requirements Visual Studio professional or greater plus the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the excellent Dmytro Kryvko’s Extended Strongly Typed Resource Generator 2.3 at http://dmytro.kryvko.googlepages.com/ installer is at http://dmytro.kryvko.googlepages.com/ResXFileCodeGeneratorEx23.zip Code: http://cid-2b248d261d0e0035.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/LocOndemand.zip 10/17/2008 Creating a localizable Silverlight 2.0 RTW ApplicationAbout The sample below shows how you can bind language resources (resx) using only markup. The final version of Silverlight makes localization alot cleaner. Requirements Visual Studio professional or greater plus the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the excellent Dmytro Kryvko’s Extended Strongly Typed Resource Generator 2.3 at http://dmytro.kryvko.googlepages.com/ installer is at http://dmytro.kryvko.googlepages.com/ResXFileCodeGeneratorEx23.zip Instructions 1. Open Visual Studio
28. In Project Explorer right click on Strings.resx and copy and paste it into the resources folder <param name="culture" value="de" /> <param name="uiculture" value="de" /> 42. Click Save, press F5 Code: http://cid-2b248d261d0e0035.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/SL2%7C_RTM%7C_Loc.zip
Further Reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189057(VS.95).aspx 9/7/2008 Silverlight Localization Methods: User Controls Vs. ApplicationIn this article I'm going to review usercontrol and two types of localization methods around them
1. User Control Overview "UserControls are the basic unit of reusable Xaml and the code that goes with it." User Controls are sometimes called custom controls. Most Silverlight applications will use and create many usercontrols in an application to simplify the application design in a more object orientated structure. A usercontrol can be used for UI elements (eg: dropdownlist, styled buttons, image viewer etc..) or computational (eg: prime number control etc...) or data retrieval (eg: load xml etc...). Once you have created something worth re-using, you can instantiated directly in XAML as a custom type user control. eg: <CoolButtonUCNamespace:coolButton x:Name="button1" ButtonText="Click Here" />. Some samples of user controls but note most controls wont have many UI strings to localize eg:
2. Localization per custom controls On the Silverlight forums people occasionally ask how to do localization on a per control basis? eg: coolButton.xaml with coolButtonResource.de.resx where each control has its own set of resource files. This will mean you need to manage, localize & build many seperate files. To me this method gives some advantages and disadvantages Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Unless your a usercontrol vendor, this method would not be my first choice. 3. Localization on application only The excellent Jordan Hammond created a novel way and wrote sample application by registering custom dependency properties and having all controls in generic.xaml. But if you to have seperate controls, downloadable on demand, but I'll try to explain the logic and basics. First review the good example of creating a reusable user control http://community.devexpress.com/blogs/theonewith/archive/2008/08/06/custom-silverlight-controls-creating-a-reusable-messagebox-dialog-part-i.aspx Note a custom type user control can register custom dependency properties where you can set all localisable resources in its declaration and bind xaml at runtime eg: <CoolButtonUCNamespace:coolButton x:Name="button1" ButtonText="Click Here" /> as <CoolButtonUCNamespace:coolButton x:Name="button1" ButtonText="{Binding LocButtonText, Source={StaticResource LocStrings}}" /> using the resx xaml binding as shown in the previous article. Using this method you can expose all UI string properties in each of your user controls. This allows you to override the default strings and use a single application resx file per application rather than a rex per control. Advantages:
Disadvantages:
4. Conclusion Thanks Jordan to pointing me to this method. I believe the localization per application is better due to the cleaner content and code separation which makes life far easier for the translator. Please share your thoughts below. Updated: See bluetext control on http://wpf-e.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2B248D261D0E0035!407.entry for code sample
|
|||||||||
|
|
