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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T02:13:17+00:00

I need to localize a WPF app that is run via Clickonce. The catch

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I need to localize a WPF app that is run via Clickonce. The catch is that the product we intend to distribute this app with has “language packs,” where the user can upload a Spanish/French/Japanese/etc. language pack and it translates the web interface. We also want the WPF app to run in whatever language the website is running in. I plan to use the WPF Localization Extension for localization: http://wpflocalizeextension.codeplex.com/

The problem is that each language pack has to be its own isolated product on a release cycle separate from the main product’s release cycle. Furthermore, we cannot include all languages because this is going on a small ARM9 device that has 8MB of ROM. And because each language pack is a separate cycle, we don’t know what language packs exist when building the app. (E.g.: a few weeks after releasing a new version, we release a new language pack that adds a previously-unsupported language.)

One solution I have thought of is including the English version of the WPF app with the default English installation, and then have each language pack add the Resources.dll and replace the manifest with one that has a reference to the new Resources.dll. Is this even possible with the strict file hashing and code signing requirements of Clickonce, or is it going to freak out if the app manifest is tampered with when a language pack is installed? Are there ways to do this in the Microsoft ecosystem? It seems that you have to know what languages are supported beforehand when you generate the Clickonce deployment. Barring that, any suggestions for more modular localization+deployment systems?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It will freak out if you change one of the files and don’t re-sign the manifest.

    If this is an internal-only app, you could deploy it and turn of the signing/hashing. This does add a significant security risk (your app could be easily hijacked and replaced with malware), so you don’t want to do it if there is internet access to the installation.

    I think you can also turn off hashing on one file — look in the Application Files dialog. Again, this is a security risk, but not as much as unhashing the entire deployment.

    You could create different deployments for each language pack, or have the app download the right language pack after it starts up and change the path to the resources. I don’t know if that’s really possible, but thought I’d throw it out there.

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