Macadamian Blog

Which localization framework to use on a WPF project?

Microsoft recommends using a tool called LocBaml to localize the strings in your WPF application. We spent a lot of time trying to get LocBaml to work, and ended up dropping it, particularly because

• Documentation for the tool from Microsoft is sparse. You have to rely on blog posts and articles like this
• The tool appears to be a beta from Microsoft, and there are a number of known bugs. I haven't seen any indication of when they'll be fixed.
• Using tool is a 10+ step process, and this process needs to be repeated frequently to update the localization. It involves command line operations, generating .csv files, etc. all of which is reported to be error-prone

A project developed in 2008 (under MS public license) called Extension: WPF Localization got a lot of favorable reviews on the web, so we decided to try that instead. It is simply 4 .cs files which provides a localization framework and dynamic language switching at run-time, among other benefits. The documentation and examples are also quite good. Until we hear updates on LocBaml, this is a framework we'll definitely re-use in future projects.