Multi-Language Add-In for Visual Studio

Posted by Phil on Tue 29 of Jul, 2008 20:31 GMT

Assuming that you are using .NET framework 2.0 or later, then you can register es-US as a custom culture. The Add-In handles custom cultures identically to built-in cultures. (At least I hope it does, it was quite a lot of work!)

The only easy way that I know to register a custom culture is by writing a program to do it. I have made a simple project to register or unregister es-US, which you can download with the link http://www.jollans.com/AmericanSpanish.zip.

This is what it does:

Private Sub btRegister_Click( ByVal sender As System.Object,  ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btRegister.Click

    Dim cib As CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder = Nothing

    ' Create a CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder object named "es-US".
    cib = New CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder ( "es-US", CultureAndRegionModifiers.None )

    ' Populate the new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder object with culture information.
    Dim ci As New CultureInfo("es-MX")
    cib.LoadDataFromCultureInfo(ci)

    ' Populate the new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder object with region information.
    Dim ri As New RegionInfo("US")
    cib.LoadDataFromRegionInfo(ri)
    
    'Define some specific parameters
    cib.TwoLetterISORegionName = "US"
    cib.CultureEnglishName     = "Spanish (United States)"
    cib.CultureNativeName      = "Español (Estados Unidos)"
    
    ' Register the custom culture.
    cib.Register()    

  End Sub

Private Sub btUnregister_Click( ByVal sender As System.Object,  ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btUnregister.Click
    
    ' Unregister the culture
    CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Unregister("es-US")
  
  End Sub

If you want to use this code, you must add a reference to sysglobl.dll to your project.

The register button copies the culture settings from es-MX, but then overwrites the regional settings with the US settings. I hope that this includes things like the date format and decimal separator, but I haven't tested it.

The language list in the Add-In initially shows the language name in Spanish, even on an English system. I haven't figured this out yet, but it hardly seems critical. You can switch the list to English or Native Language, which display it correctly.

The big drawback of custom languages is that you have to register them on the target machine as well. For an ASP project, this means that you must register the language on the server.

Now to your other questions:

The Add-In always prefers to add neutral cultures before adding specific cultures. This is sensible for Windows Forms projects, but might not always be so good for ASP projects. Perhaps I should make it less strict.

By the way, if you don't want to have the neutral Spanish culture, then you can remove it via the context menu.

ASP pages have a Culture and a UICulture property. You can set Page.UICulture to a neutral culture, but Page.Culture has to be set to a specific culture. This poses a problem if you use a neutral culture for an ASP page.

If you use the SelectLanguage web control from the Add-In, then when you select a neutral culture, it simply searches for the first specific culture and uses that one. I presume that this is what you mean when you say that the Add-In uses es-MX for Spanish alone. (There is certainly no hard coded connection between es and es-MX.) If that is the case, then you can edit the code in the SelectLanguage web control to implement some other logic.

Phil