Question

I’ve got a winform application which uses it’s own mechanism for localization. It doesn’t use Satellite assemblies and I am not sure why. Are there any reasons that Satellite assemblies not suitable for winforms application localization?

Answer 1

In most cases Localization via Satellite Assemblies is the best possible option. This is a standard practice and it should be followed unless you have good reasons not to.

The good reasons for creating your own solution:

• Your User Interface is dynamic that is texts often change quite a lot (i.e. depending on the customer). In such case it makes sense to keep translatable resources and corresponding translations in the database
• The translators you are cooperating with do not know the first thing about XML and technical translations, therefore having them translating resx files is too dangerous. In such case you might want to implement your own solution, i.e. having translations in config-like files
• You are the boss, you know i18n better than subject matter experts and you are going to correct this lame implementation of Microsoft engineers. Not you of course but original developer – usually somebody with huge ego or somebody suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome might think it is a good idea to come with “better” solution

For the real reason why the application uses non-standard approach, you probably need to ask the original developer (or somebody else who might know the answer). From my experience it would be one of the reasons listed above, quite often the third one.