Question

I am having a bit of a hard time providing localized strings for the UI in a small Silverlight 4 application. Basically I’ve put a folder “Resources” and placed two resource files in it :

Statuses.resx
Statuses.ro.resx

I do have an enum Statuses :

public enum Statuses
{
    None,
    Working
}

and a convertor :

public class StatusToMessage : IValueConverter
{
    public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        if (!Enum.IsDefined(typeof(Status), value))
        {
            throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("value");
        }
        var x = Statuses.None;
        return Statuses.ResourceManager.GetString(((Status)value).ToString(), Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture);
    }

    public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

in the view I have a textblock :

    <TextBlock Grid.Column="3" Text="{Binding Status, Converter={StaticResource StatusToMessage}}" />

Upon view rendering the converter is called but no matter what the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture is set it always returns the default culture value.

Upon further inspection I took apart the XAP resulted file, taken the resulted DLL file to Reflector and inspected the embedded resources. It only contains the default resource!!

Going back to the two resource files I am now inspecting their properties :

Build action : Embedded Resource
Copy to output directory : Do not copy
Custom tool : ResXFileCodeGenerator
Custom tool namespace : [empty]

Both resource (.resx) files have these settings. The .Designer.cs resulted files are as follows :

Statuses.Designer.cs :

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// <auto-generated>
//     This code was generated by a tool.
//     Runtime Version:4.0.30319.1
//
//     Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if
//     the code is regenerated.
// </auto-generated>
//------------------------------------------------------------------------------

namespace SilverlightApplication5.Resources {
    using System;


    /// <summary>
    ///   A strongly-typed resource class, for looking up localized strings, etc.
    /// </summary>
    // This class was auto-generated by the StronglyTypedResourceBuilder
    // class via a tool like ResGen or Visual Studio.
    // To add or remove a member, edit your .ResX file then rerun ResGen
    // with the /str option, or rebuild your VS project.
    [global::System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("System.Resources.Tools.StronglyTypedResourceBuilder", "4.0.0.0")]
    [global::System.Diagnostics.DebuggerNonUserCodeAttribute()]
    [global::System.Runtime.CompilerServices.CompilerGeneratedAttribute()]
    internal class Statuses {

// ... yadda-yadda

Statuses.ro.Designer.cs

[empty]

I’ve taken both files and put them in a console application and they behave as expected in it, not like in this silverlight application.

What is wrong?

Answer 1

It turns out you just have to do one more tintsy thing. As the MSDN article says :

In Solution Explorer, right-click the
project name, and then click Unload
Project to close the project while
leaving the project icon visible.

In Solution Explorer, right-click the
project name, and then click Edit.

The project file opens in the Visual
Studio XML Editor.

In the project file, add the names of
the region-neutral and specific
cultures whose satellite assemblies
your application has created to the
<SupportedCultures> tag. If your
application supports multiple
cultures, use a semicolon (;) to
separate their names. This list of
cultures should not include your
application’s default culture. For
example, a <SupportedCultures> tag for
an application whose default culture
is English (“en”) and that supports
the English – United States (“en-US”),
French (“fr”), French – France
(“fr-FR”), Russian (“ru”), and Russian
– Russia (“ru-RU”) cultures might appear as follows:

<SupportedCultures>en-US;fr;fr-FR;ru;ru-RU;</SupportedCultures>

So, remember to f!@#ingly manual edit the project file and specify which cultures to include in the compilation.

Now it effing works 😀