This is really interesting. I reviewed the WPF localization guide on CodePlex and for the most part, I prefer your solution to any of those discussed in the document.

The one thing I like about the x:Static approach is the ability to catch binding errors at compile time. I take it this is impossible to achieve using standard binding? (Sorry, I’m pretty new to WPF so hopefully this isn’t a really dumb question).

Thanks!

Seems like the prism exemple zip file is invalid. i tried to open it in 2 different computers and I get an error messages. Please check.

Thanks

The ResourceManager does allow us to work with things other than strings too (images etc) but again, I don’t think that works in Silverlight, although I’ve not tried it in SL3.

At least all of these approaches avoid LocBAML and strong references to UIElements/Events

My thought right now is to include a LocalizableViewModel in the MVVM Light Toolkit, which would cover simple scenarios, and then your solution with the ResourceManagerService is great for complex and distributed scenarios.

Nice work
Laurent

This approach can be leveraged into a “LocalizableViewModel” base class, like Corrado Cavalli is exposing here: http://groups.google.com/group/wpf-disciples/browse_thread/thread/acf4b88103a9872

I think I just found a new feature to add to the MVVM Light Toolkit…

Cheers,
Laurent

I must admit I haven’t considered Silverlight yet, although I probably should have. It’s a shame that Binding is so closed off, it would be nice if we could extend it with something like:

Bindings.RegisterExtension(regEx, (src, ctx, opt) => { return ctx[opt.params[0]]; } );

Probably never going to happen though

Another Silverlight alternative would be to possibly use T4 to automatically generate INPC classes based on a resx, or even replace the standard resx compiler with something that produces INPC classes. I do like to stick to resx files, partly for the tooling support, and partly because I can just ship the XML files to a translation house to be translated.

Unfortunately, I am not sure that the solution you propose here works in Silverlight either. As far as I can remember, the array syntax is not supported in bindings in Silverlight. I didn’t test the “dot” syntax, but I am pretty sure that it will also fail in SL.

So what’s left if we want an ubiquitous solution? Well, what I do is that I declare some properties on my VM (or on a sub-VM dedicated to localization) and I bind to these properties. On the plus side: It is a fairly easy syntax, and uses the well known mechanisms of ViewModels. If the application needs to change language dynamically, you can use PropertyChanged events, which are also well known. This works in SL and in WPF.

On the down side however, declaring one VM property for every possible localizable string can be a total overkill in large applications.

For WPF applications, I think that the solution you propose is innovative and definitely worth analyzing further.

Finally, as usual when I talk about localization, I want to mention that the firm Alchemy is proposing a localization tool that claims to support WYSIWYG. There is a demo available on their website. I was in contact with them and need to spend some time evaluating the tool when I will have more time.

Cheers,
Laurent