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The question might sound weird, but I am planning to create a asp.net website, which when fully done, will ideally cater to all countries.

I am currently in the architecture phase.. and is there anything that I should keep in might when doing this?

like
saving all datetime fields in utc
using user's timezone to display all time related data
all labels in the website to be localizable

is there anything else??

thanks,
Chris

Chris
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    When it comes to timezones, this question can be of use: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2532729/daylight-saving-time-and-timezone-best-practices – Oded Jan 04 '11 at 17:36
  • Localization is hard, tedious work, avoid it if you can. :) But it's good to make architecture choices up front to support it. Focus mostly on the UTC and character encoding database stuff for now. – Greg Jan 04 '11 at 18:06
  • This is not really technical, but if you can gather an international team, that helps a lot. These people will implicitely detect and test many things "for free" :-) – Simon Mourier Jan 04 '11 at 18:10

3 Answers3

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A few additional points:

  • Some languages read from Right to Left (Hebrew for example), which will affect your UI.
  • Make sure your datastore supports unicode (NVARHCAR vs VARCHAR).
  • Provide an easy way for translators to contribute content. Usually means creating a Data Driven Resource Provider.

Internationalization and Localization is a good place to start.

Bill N
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You should think about how the localization process will take place. I assume you are not a native speaker in all languages you want to use for your application.

There are several approachs on how to address this: For example, there are companies that specialize in localization, meaning you give them an excel sheet, or an xml file.

You should also think about, where do you want to have all these localizations. Do you only want them in your ASP.net application, meaning in only one place? Then the resource file will be your way to go, because they are easy to handle and easy to send to localization studios. But if you want to use the localizations in more than one place, you need to store them in a web service or in a database. Keep in mind that using localizations across multiple plattforms (e.g. web site, administrative tools) will force you to write import/export functionality for the used tables. (Because you won't give the localization company access to your database)

citronas
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I would start by looking here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c6zyy3s9.aspx.

I also guess you are working on doing a SQL database. If that is the case look at things like using nvarchars.

J Henzel
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