MSDN Magazine - November 2008 - (Page 21)

it relied on a custom culture or an OS culture. But with all of the data coming from the OS, a single Silverlight application is more likely to run into different data. It is a good idea to make sure your target OS supports the UI cultures you want to use and to make sure your application behaves in a reasonable manner when the requested culture is not present. Culture data is baked into the .NET Framework, making it difficult to update at the same frequency at which the data changes. This leads to data that can be out of date. It can also lead to the situation in which native applications and managed applications display different data. In Silverlight, you get consistency between the two, and applications can take advantage of updated OS information. Using OS data also allows you to take advantage of more information. For example, in the desktop version of the .NET Framework, every CultureInfo has a single-parent culture, and to look up resources, all the ResourceManager has to do is simply walk the parent chain. Take an application with de-DE resources and fr-FR resources. Now let’s say that you have a user with es-ES as the primary culture but who also knows German and could read de-DE resources. The ResourceManager would fall back to the invariant culture even though resources existed that the user could understand. Most modern operating systems allow users to specify multiple language preferences. In Silverlight, we modified the ResourceManager to follow those preferences before falling back to the invariant culture. Silverlight also contains a few differences in string comparison that are related to security rather than size. The default for most of the operations that involve string comparison in the desktop Framework is CurrentCulture. In Silverlight, the operations that involve partial matching, which includes both String.IndexOf and String.StartsWith, now use ordinal comparison by default. Compare and CompareTo still use CurrentCulture for the default, though you should really think about whether or not you are using the correct overload for the specific behavior you want. ToUpper and ToLower now use the InvariantCulture by default. Equality still uses ordinal comparison. The “Web Like Desktop” Revolution Eliminating Web Limitations Desktop Simplicity Proven 90% saving in development Desktop Performance Regardless of application's size & weight Flexibility Customizable & extendable Interoperability Integrates with any .NET component Desktop Security No exposure of data, logic & tokens on client DHTML or Silverlight Develop once access either way Further Reading If you would like to have more information about building worldready applications for Silverlight and Windows, a couple of good resources for you to look include the top-level MSDN pages for System.Globalization (msdn.microsoft.com/lsystem.globalization), for System.Resources (msdn.microsoft.com/system.resources.aspx), and for System.Text (msdn.microsoft.com/system.text). You can find links to more detailed information there, as well as helpful example code. Finally, the Go Global Developer Center, available at msdn.microsoft.com/goglobal, is also an excellent resource for information about building international applications. T all ity at last r Goodyea “Simplic ASP MVP WOW” ctive you w produ hl ulous ho MVP Stra “It’s ridic like this” l ith a too an be w c You . Magic. a nd Boom This is mpile it a n “Co pplicatio ar a web A af Sa have n” SAP As revolutio ven Field Pro I can say is Free Download Live Demo Visit us at PDC2008 Booth 110 MELITTA ANDERSEN is a Program Manager on the Base Class Libraries team of the CLR. She mainly works on numerics, collections, and some of the infrastructure detailed in this column. msdnmagazine.com www.VisualWebGui.com November 2008 21 http://msdn.microsoft.com/lsystem.globalization http://msdn.microsoft.com/system.resources.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/system.text http://msdn.microsoft.com/goglobal http://www.VisualWebGui.com http://msdn.microsoft.com/goglobal http://www.msdnmagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - November 2008

Contents MSDN Magazine - November 2008 Toolbox CLR Inside Out Data Points Cutting Edge Security Briefs Test Your Security IQ Agile SDL Access Control Utility Spotlight RIA Test Run Wicked Code Foundations Team System End Bracket

MSDN Magazine - November 2008

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