Globalizing and Localizing Applications

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This article applies to Visual Studio 2015. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here

If you plan on distributing your application to an international audience, you'll need to keep several things in mind during the design and development phases. Even if you don't have such plans, a small effort up front can make things considerably easier should your plans change in future versions of your application. Services built into the .NET Framework make it easy to develop a single application that can adapt to different locales using managed development with Visual Studio.

Visual Studio was designed from the start to make developing for an international audience easy by taking advantage of services built into the .NET Framework. The following pages will help introduce you to the internationalization features built into Visual Studio.

In This Section

Introduction to International Applications Based on the .NET Framework Introduces the concepts related to developing software for an international market using Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.

Localizing Applications Provides links to pages about customizing applications for a given culture.

Globalizing Applications Provides links to pages about creating applications that support multiple cultures.

Globalizing your app (Windows Store apps using JavaScript and HTML) Contains how-to topics and guidelines to help you globalize and localize your Windows 8.x Store app built using JavaScript and HTML.

Globalizing your app (Windows Store apps using C#/VB/C++ and XAML) Contains how-to topics and guidelines to help you globalize and localize your Windows 8.x Store app built using XAML and Visual C#, Visual Basic, or Visual C++.

Best Practices for Developing World-Ready Applications Provides background information on programming for an international audience.

Class Library Overview Introduces the classes, interfaces, and value types that expedite and optimize the development process and provide access to system functionality.

System.Globalization Points out the classes in this namespace, which define culture-related information, including the language, the country/region, the calendars in use, the format patterns for dates, currency and numbers, and the sort order for strings.

System.Resources Points out the classes and interfaces in this namespace, which allows developers to create, store, and manage various culture-specific resources used in an application.