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Working with resx files in Visual Studio
Posted by on 2015-11-05
Today I found a nice Visual Studio Extension for working with localization and resx files: Resx Resource Manager. This extension provides an additional view in your project and scans all the resx files. I would recommend it to all projects where you have to translate your interface. Here is how it looks in my project:
It can also assist with some machine translation from Bing and MyMemory:
Another good thing is the Export and Import to and from Excel. Wonderful if you need help from Non-developers.
You haven’t thought all the issues through. I once tested this app and it doesn’t monitor strings for changes so their translations will quietly go stale. It also doesn’t ensure that formatters in your strings like {0} are present in all translated strings. Also, if you send an Excel file to a translator and then change some of those strings in your solution, the program ignores this when you later import the Excel file back in. It can therefore overwrite these changes, and/or add translations that are no longer accurate, and/or add keys back that you changed or deleted, resulting in duplicate or obsolete keys (and strings). I tested all this. BTW, Excel doesn’t handle tabs, i.e., ASCII 9 that may be in your strings (hopefully most don’t use any). Bottom line is that program looks nice but has too many issues like this. I use a paid product instead (far superior and without any of these issues).
Thank you for your feedback, Mike. I appreciate that. The Resx Resource Manager Extension is not perfect, though it is better than nothing. Just comparing and updating raw resx files is a pain. The Resx Resource Manager simplifies it. On the other hand I totally agree with you that this tools has many shortcomings. It would be nice if Visual Studio provided this functionality in a consistent way. I have experience with transifex and launchpad. That kind of service would be really nice. What service do you use? And again, thank you very much for your opinion.
I use this product http://www.hexadigm.com, since it was the only one I could find that deals with all the issues I mentioned (as a programmer, the ones I care about the most).