Question

We have some auto-generated resource files in our project in Visual Studio 2008, with some localized versions, and in one of these localized versions, there is a string which in this case is empty.

More explicit. We have a core resource file, with lots of string resources. We then have 4 other localized versions of thisfile, and in one of these other localized files, one of the strings is given an empty value.

The problem now is that the form designer is quite happy about having found a resource for a string, and will apparently stop at nothing for reusing this resource for any empty strings it will assign a property in the generated designer code for a form.

For instance, if for some reason a property on a control is not specified with a default value (so it will be serialized to code even if it is empty), then it will reference our resource instead of writing out the empty string literal in the C# code.

Problem is that it references the localized versions, and these aren’t compiled to code.

Here’s an abbreviated code example:

this.rpAllFields.KeyTip =    global::namespaces.SystemMessagesResources_sv_SE.     dash_red_shift_info_description; 

In this case, the dash_red_shift_info_description does not have a value for the sv-SE locale, so the designer, when it sees an empty string in the code, will try to link to that resource. But the SystemMessagesResources_sv_SE isn’t an existing class, but seemingly a generated class name for the swedish localized version of the SystemMessagesResources resource file, which is compiled to a class.

Is this possible to avoid? We’re getting rather tired of the search/replace each time we change something in the form files, and we’re pretty sure there’s a slap-my-forehead-boneheaded thing we’ve done that make this happens, but we’re aparently not capable of finding the cause of this ourselves.

The above code would, if we removed the resource, read like this:

this.rpAllFields.KeyTip = ''; 

Answer 1

You might try creating a string resource empty_string, defined as ” for every locale. If you make it the first resource, the form designer will (hopefully) always pick that one as the value to sprinkle through your forms. This way at least you’ll be using a string designated for that purpose.