I have a localized WinForms application. To avoid a large number of iterations in the translation procedure, I have given our translators software to allow them to edit the .resx files directly.
This has worked great for the resource files that are not tied to UI components (Forms/Controls), but for forms and Controls the resources don't seem to be getting updated. What I mean by this, is that at design-time all resource strings are correct (Text/ToolTips et al.) and I can see the correct translations - when I run the application (debug or any other release) the translations are not being updated, why?
Thanks for your time.
Edit1. The plot thickens further. There are two buttons that are not being updated at all when I change their components (button text, tooltip or any thing governed by the underlying resource file). Lets say I change the button text from 'Lock Workbook' to 'Lock Workbook GG', then the new text shows in the designer and the .resx files (both in the .resx designer and the code behind) but when I run the code (in debug or release mode) the button text is not updated!?
If I update the button next to the button I updated above, this does change the text in the running application?? This is baking my noodle as I fail to see where the old text is being stored and why for a sub-set of buttons their component text is not getting updated!?
Any ideas are warmly welcomed!
Edit2. I have tried to delete the .suo and clean and recompile. I have also removed the troublesome form from the solution and re added it.
So that you can see this strange behavior, here is one of the problematic buttons ('Lock Workbook GG') and a normal one ('Set as Default Workbook GG').
Now at run-time I see
Maybe your build settings are wrong?
This is what I have for my dll.
I have given our translators software to allow them to edit the .resx files directly
That certainly was not a good idea. Any professional translator will know how to tackle .NET resx files. Even if they don't have any of the tooling that's traditionally used by translators, like SDL Passolo, then they would still fall back to the standard Winres.exe utility included with the SDK.
Whatever you wrote probably has a bug. Quite hard to reverse-engineer from the question what that bug might be. Other than that the .resx file for a Winforms form is quite different from the one you get from Resource File project template or the resource designer. There are lots of resource naming tricks to avoid ambiguity between the form's properties and the properties of its controls. Get a name wrong and it won't work right.
Don't write your own, at least ask them to use Winres.exe if necessary. It is free.
The bindings to the button are made in the Designer File of the related form, have you checked whether there are some issues? Try removing the code that sets the ressource and re-add it via the designer.
Probably this has something to do with the CopyLocal property. Please check if these are TRUE for these resource files. If not, set them to true, otherwise, after succesfull compilation, they are not being copied to the output directory.
Related
I have an application that I am developing that is made with Window Forms. For localizing all my Labels, ToolStripMenuItems, Buttons, etc I use resx resource files. Specifically to localize my application for German, I open my Main.en-CA.resx file in winres. I then go through all the terms found in the form and change them to their German translation. I then save the file to Main.de-DE.resx. I now have a Main.en-CA.resx file and a Main.de-DE.resx file. In my code I then only have to change the current culture to whatever language I want and apply the change to all my Labels, Controls, Buttons, etc. For example something like this:
System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo(language);
// Must re-apply resources after changing the culture
System.ComponentModel.ComponentResourceManager resources = new System.ComponentModel.ComponentResourceManager(typeof(Main));
resources.ApplyResources(this, "$this");
foreach (Control c in this.Controls)
{
resources.ApplyResources(c, c.Name);
}
This seems to work great for all Labels etc that do not change. I do however have entries that are changed. For example I might have a dropdown ComboBox that is filled with the entries: "Apple", "Banana", "Orange". Or I might have some error messages: "Missing Input", "Cannot find xml file" that are only sometimes displayed. Now I suppose maybe for the error messages I could just have Labels and selectively change their visibility depending on whether they need to be shown, however for the dropdown ComboBox these entries might change depending on say which file the user loads.
I am wondering then, is there a way to store these entries in the resx files and then access them from my code. I tried opening the resx files and adding them manually (i.e. without using winres) but attempting to do this resulted in the warning:
You are trying to edit a resource file that is a part of another project item (such as a form or control). Editing this item could corrupt the project item, and you will have to recover it by hand. In addition, changes made to this resource file may be lost if further changes are made to the project item.
Do you really want to edit this file?
This sounded like a bad idea so I didn't try that any further. Additionally I am not sure on how I would access the terms in the file manually. I am very new to windows forms and resource files (this is my first time using them) so I realize this might be a simple question but I have had trouble finding information on how exactly to do this.
Ok as it turns out I have uncovered how I can achieve what I am looking for. Ok from the SO post I can access any strings stored in the files Resource.resx by the code:
myLabel.Text = Properties.Resources.MissingController;
where MissingController is a key (i.e. Name) in the file Resources.resx.
Therefore all I need to do is add additional resource files such as Resource.de-DE.resx in the case of German and fill in the translations (i.e. the values in the resource file) corresponding to the same keys (i.e. the names in the resource file).
The Resources.resx file looks like:
and the Resources.de-DE.resx looks like:
As mentioned in the question I had already created some resource files for translating my forms but I had used winres. Whereas they had been located under my Main.cs [Design] file, the Resources.resx and Resources.de-de.resx are located under Properties. Because I had used winres to make my resx files I think that meant I was not supposed to manually edit them hence the warning it gave?? I'm still not 100% sure about this.
Regardless I can now just manually add terms to my Resource.resx file as well as create different versions of this file for different languages and the localization will work. When right clicking on Properties and going Add->New Item and then selecting Resource, if you do not see the Resource file type as an option (as happened to me) then that might mean you need to add the development tools that did not get installed with your version of visual studio. You can achieve this by just running the visual studio installer again and clicking modify and adding the .NET development tools.
I am having an issue where when using the localizable property in the windows forms designer. I have a label that has its Text property set by a resource file, and I want that text to change to another string in the resource file when a button is clicked. There is no issue adding the new string to the resource files or getting the strings with a resource manager. The problem is that every time I open the form designer, the resource generator wipes out that new string that was manually added.
Q: Is there a way,using best practices, to have generated localization resources from the designer and manually created ones live happily together?
I was under the impression that the Microsoft documentation states not to mix project and form resource files for localization, which is why I'm not taking that approach. Though I may have misunderstood the rational as indicated in this document.
EDIT: Reproducible steps
1. Create a windows form (Form1) with a button (button1) and a label (label1)
2. set label1.Text = "Hello";
3. set the localizable property of Form1 in the designer to true
4. In the Form1.resx file that is generated, add a string resource named "strWorld" with a value of "world". When you start typing, click okay on the message box that appears; agreeing that you are foolish enough to modify the resource file that is part of the form.
Steps 5 and 6 optional
5. Add the following eventHandler
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
ResourceManager resources = new ComponentResourceManager(typeof(Form1));
label1.Text = resources.GetString("strWorld");
}
6. Build and start the application to verify that the button functions
7. return to the designer and nudge the button by a pixel or two (or change anything else)
8. return to Form1.resx to find strWorld gone.
I am trying to figure out how one can visually align elements in different languages, taking advantage of the form designer, have controls that change properties of elements from said resource files and stay within recommended practices. Does one have to roll their own code around this or use a 3rd party solution or is there just something that I'm missing? Surely this is a common enough issue.
I think Microsoft expect you to do define texts
in the designer or
in the source code
If you enable localization, texts you specify in the designer will be stored in the local resx files associated with the form or the user control.
For each property in the designer, you can specify one text only.
If you want to change the text at runtime, you should define the text in the source code, and update it from your code.
Microsoft would expect you localize this text using named resources, which would be defined in the Resources.resx file at project level. The localized versions would be in localized versions of Resources.resx.
(If you define additional resources of your own in the "local" resource file associated with a form, the designer will probably discard them.)
I don't know if that is "best practice", but I think that is how Microsoft expect you to work.
This problem has left me scratching my head! I'll try to be as concise as possible.
On a high level:
The problem is that although the project works fine and the code looks good to me. Whenever I edit and build certain forms, Visual Studio re-writes the *.Designer.cs files in a way that is very undesirable.
I quite confident that these *.Designer.cs files have not been edited (especially the auto-generated portion) in the past.
In more detail:
Our project uses custom controls, some which inherit from PictureBox. On the forms where these controls are present, if I view the *.Designer.cs file, I either see that the Image property is not set, or the Image property refers to an image stored in the project's resx file like below, which is all well and good.
this.customButton.Image = global::MyProject.Properties.Resources.buttonImage;
However, if I simply modify this form by adding another control (drag another button onto the form) and build the project, Visual Studio extensively edits the MyForm.Designer.cs and MyForm.resx files, even for the existing controls on the form that were not touched. It seems that it embeds all the images needed by the controls in the MyForm.resx file and then refers to them in the MyForm.Designer.cs as follows:
System.ComponentModel.ComponentResourceManager resources = new System.ComponentModel.ComponentResourceManager(typeof(MyForm));
this.customButton.Image = ((System.Drawing.Image)(resources.GetObject("customButton.Image")));
This is obviously not what I want. Why does Visual Studio want the form to use a local resource now, instead of the one embedded in the project's Resources.resx file as it was happy to do before the form was modified? If I go to the designer, view the properties of the customButton, and try to set the Image property to the image in the project resource file, it allows it, but on the next click, it will immediately revert back to the local reference embedded in MyForm.resx.
Any ideas why this is happening?
I figured this out with the help of another question
Basically, even though I've seen several recommendations to centralize your application's resources in a single assembly, this appears to be a bad choice. The VS Designer just doesn't like having to access resources external to the current assembly and while it can do so, it will also change your code to bring those resources in the current assembly by embedding them, thwarting your efforts to keep the resources in a single assembly.
I basically had to go back to keeping resources in the assembly the uses them.
I have a solution that uses a native .DLL library that is wrapped by a .NET .DLL with a C# GUI.
All my plumbing works just fine in Debug mode. The moment I try going to Release mode, I get a whole whack of error messages, largely to do with the .CPP files in the native library. Errors include the following:
definition of dllimport function not allowed
TRACE_DEBUG_METHOD_CALL: identifier not found
a lot of undeclared identifiers in my main .CPP file (eg: DLLAPI_Release: undeclared identifier)
I have to admit that the Properties configuration for a C/C++ project is overwhelming so I wonder if there is one or more simple settings somewhere that I simply need to modify.
ALSO, is there a book out there that is devoted to the project properties window in VS2010 specifically? I have a few books but none really spend anytime on what is obviously a very crucial component to serious app development.
I appreciate any assistance anyone can offer. Thanks!
This is not unlikely to happen when you made a bunch of setting changes but didn't also make them for the Release build. Easy to forget, the first time anyway. You can easily tell which settings were changed from the default, they are displayed in bold type. Step through the setting pages, flip back-and-forth with the Configuration combobox in the upper left corner.
About 15 minutes of your life, not counting the thinking time you need because the setting should be different for the Release build. Start another instance of Visual Studio with a dummy project to verify that.
Trying to compare the property pages can be a beating. My recommendation would be to open the property pages for your project, select the Debug configuration, and under "C/C++", select "Command Line" and copy the command line options into a text editor, then do the same for the Release configuration and see where they differ. You'll need to do the same for the "Linker" command line.
Some of the differences will be intentional (e.g. debug flags should be set for the Debug configuration), but you should be able to spot things that should be the same but are not.
Actually tracking down where the command line options are set can be a bit of a pain, especially if you are using property sheets to manage common properties between projects, but generally you should be able to track them down just by looking through the different options on the different pages.
As for a reference, the best reference is the actual compiler documentation on MSDN. There is a section containing all of the documented compiler options and one containing all of the documented linker options.
The property pages are just a GUI frontend for setting these various options. When you select one of the properties in the property pages, it should say in the help box at the bottom of the dialog which compiler options are used by that property.
After running ReSharper on our project we receive the following error multiple times in various resx files;
"Duplicate Resource"
Is there a way we can easily clean each forms resx file. For example, is there a way we can safely regenerate the resx file within VS2010?
This is a C# project.
I'm the author of a commercial localization product (see http://www.hexadigm.com). If your ".resx" files are code-behind files for a windows form or user control (created and managed by the VS forms designer), then you can normally fix the problem by setting the form's "Localizable" property to false and then immediately back to true again (in the VS forms designer). That will regenerate the ".resx" file and normally eliminate any duplicates (backup your files first however, just in case). For other ".resx" files however (non-code-behind files you manage yourself), I'm not aware of any tool that will fix this for you. Note that my own product however will trap this problem (and others) but doesn't fix it. It's too risky IMO. If you have a duplicate resource that is, then the entire ".resx" file is suspect so attempting to automate a fix could make things worse (since the file could potentially have more serious problems than just duplicates). In reality it normally is just a case of duplicates (nothing more serious) but IMO it's safer for the programmer to diagnose the situation so my app will report each duplicate and then abandon processing of the affected ".resx" file (which I report to the user accordingly, as well as record to the VS Output window).