Question

I’m having a little trouble getting localized resources files to work on Windows Phone 7. Here’s what I’m doing:

1. Create a resource file, say “Strings.resx” (Build Action: Compile)
2. Create a key, say “TestKey” with a default value of empty string
3. Add a English resource file in the same folder with a value of “some English string”: Strings.en-us.resx (Build Action: Embedded Resource)
4. Add a Japanese resource file in the same folder with a value of “some Japanese string”: Strings.ja-jp.resx (Build Action: Embedded Resource)

In my PC Silverlight, WPF Apps that works fine when I change the Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture. But in the phone I always seem to be getting the value that’s in the Strings.resx file – an empty string.

I have tried using the designer generated code and wiring up the resource manager by hand and it does not seem to matter. Here’s my code:

            Type t = typeof(Strings);

            _resourceManager = new ResourceManager(
                t.Namespace + "." + t.Name,
                t.Assembly);

            _resourceManager.GetString("TestKey");

Tell me localized resources are supported on the phone… ;> What am I doing wrong? Thanks!

Update: Thanks Olivier for forwarding the link. I saw that as well but missed an important step. I didn’t add the “SupportedCultures” node to my csproj. Made all the difference – hoping someone else doesn’t loose two hours trying to figure this out like I did.

<SupportedCultures>de-DE;es-ES;</SupportedCultures>

Answer 1

I wrote a blog post that provides links to a bunch of Globalization / Localization guides for WP7. There is a Windows Phone 7 in 7 Training video that helped me understand the basics. After that it was simply a matter of learning how to do databinding:

The MSDN article shows you how to
setup the files and create the
LocalizedStrings class, but they then
assume that you know how to use that
class for data binding. Visual Studio
2010 and Silverlight handle data
binding differently than Winforms, and
it gets even more confusing since XAML
also has it’s own definition of
Resources that are different then the
.NET resources we just created.
Silverlight also uses the term
Resource to refer to files that use
the the Build Action of “Content”, as
these files get wrapped up into the
.XAP file similar to how files with
Build Action of “Resource” get
embedded into the .Dll assembly (ex:
loading an image from content or
resource files). I found that instead
of using the Text=”{Binding
Path=resourceFile.resourceName,
Source={StaticResource
Localizedresources }}” XAML syntax it
was easier to use the following steps:

1. Open your primary XAML page (usually MainPage.xaml) in the Visual
   Studio designer

2. Open the properties for the PhoneApplicationPage and set the
   DataContext to be
   Application.Resources –>
   LocalizedStrings. NOTE: if you already
   are using a DataContext object, then
   you should integrate the
   LocalizedStrings class into that
   object so that it has localization
   support.

3. Once the Page’s DataContext has been set you can change the data
   binding for any control on the page by
   simply selecting the property (ex:
   text, checked, etc), selecting “Apply
   Data Binding…”, and setting the Path
   to Localizedresources.BtnText or
   whatever the name of the desired
   resource value is.