Until a couple of years ago, most software applications were released in English. Unfortunately for us the developers, nowadays, many customers require that that the product they purchased, will be localized to a specific language (other than English). I know, for instance, that there is a European law which requires healthcare products to be localized to the European market (starting from 2009 or 2010). Because this article is about how to localize your application using string tables, I recommend you to first read about a free tool which helps you extract hard coded strings to string tables. Don’t go any further before you also read about how to generate public properties for string tables, you must read it.

Setting up a String Table

I assume that you already have some user interface which needs to be localized, I will demonstrate this process with…

Here is something neat I found out.

Say you are writing an application and one of the requirements is to allow File System search. You could always start using loops and such. I thought to myself why not do it in LINQ? I played around with it and in fact it is not so hard.

Lets see how it is done. Here is method that allows finding a specific file name in side a directory.

   1: private List SearchFilesByName(string DirectoryPath, string FileName) 

   2: { 

   3:     return (from file in new DirectoryInfo(DirectoryPath).GetFiles() 

   4:             where file.Name == FileName select file).ToList(); 

   5: }

Basically we Query the FileInfo[] which is returned from the GetFiles() method and compare the file name.

During the Job Interview Challenge Series we are running here at Dev102.com, we usually get some comments from readers who think that the quality of a specific question is not good. Here are some of those comments:

1. “I hate interview questions like this, as it’s just a race to see who gets the a-ha moment first“.
2. “This is not a good interview question. What does it tell you about someone’s engineering ability? Little. It’s a brain-teaser; either you get it or you don’t”.
3. “Really enjoying the problems so far but I’m a little disappointed with this one. I prefer ‘thinking’ problems to ‘research’ ones“.
4. “Isn’t this an awfully language-specific question?“.
5. “If you presented this problem in an interview and made me an offer, I’d turn you down“.

On the other hand, many readers provided answers to the questions and enjoyed participating in those challenges. Some thought that the questions are very good: