Extended ASP.net 2.0 resource provider Model (1)

Summary: Microsoft asp.net 2.0 has made a number of wonderful improvements in localizing Web applications. Even with all these wonderful benefits, you may start to consider extensibility soon after you localize your site. This article will help you apply ASP.net's extended capabilities to handle enterprise localization scenarios and improve the localization development process.

Brief introduction

ASP.net 2.0 has made a lot of wonderful improvements in localizing Web applications. I have described these new features in the MSDN article "asp.net 2.0 Localization features:a fresh approach to localizing Web applications" (English).

Once you are familiar with these new localization features, you will immediately notice the following:

• Now, with Visual Studio 2005, you can easily generate resources for each page and call the Generate local Resource menu item in page Design view.

• Creating and using global resources is much simpler with better resource editors and strongly typed access.

• The use of declarative localized expressions makes it easy to map resource entries to control properties and content areas.

ResourceManager no longer requires manual installation, as Resxresourceproviderfactory is collaborating to retrieve resource entries from local or global resources, assigning ResourceManager as needed.

• Automatically detects the browser area preferences and assigns the zone to the request thread, making it easier to respect the zone preferences of users (even anonymous users).

It is not surprising that even with all these wonderful virtues, we tend to want more. Soon after you use these major features to localize your site, you may start thinking about something else, such as:

• How do I extract resources from an alternate location, such as a separate resource assembly or database source?

• How do you manage a mixed environment that uses both local and global resources and alternative data sources?

• How can I control the source of resources and continue to leverage the ASP.net 2.0 resource provider model, localized expressions, and other designer integration features?

• How to leverage existing localization capabilities and available extensibility options to better meet my development environment and localization process needs?

That's why scalability is so important. There are several ways to extend ASP.net localization capabilities and interact with the development environment. This article is the first of a three-part series that will help you apply ASP.net's extended capabilities to address enterprise localization scenarios and improve the localization development process.

In this article, I'll focus on such features, enabling you to retrieve resources from alternative storage locations and integrate with the page parsing, compiling, and running. I'll show you how to do this in combination with a custom resource provider, a custom expression builder, and other supported extensible types. The second article in this series will show you how to further improve the development process by integrating the selected resource store with the built-in high-performance functionality in Visual Studio 2005. The third article gives an alternative to dealing with complex resource hierarchies, for example, to support client-side customization.

Oh, where should my resources go?

Merging localized resources into a Web site is often a painful task. Generating resources is often difficult, and organizing translation resources often requires managed processes, but the more difficult aspect of resources in a Web site is knowing what to include in a resource, how to allocate those resources, and what factors affect optimal performance and maintainability.