I've generally had a fairly miserable time using winres for localizing forms.
It seems to be very buggy - loses bitmaps, doesn't display things correctly,
is generally miserably with inherited forms etc. etc. Do most people actually
use winres for localizing forms and if so how are they dealing with its
bugginess or are they using some other nifty tool that I am not aware of
(other than Notepad )

Is WinRes improved in VS.NET 2005?
Andrew

Winres was designed as a simple localization editor - it's not a good
solution for large scale projects. As you've noticed, there's no support for
translation memories, update management, string localization etc. It's just
a solution for people that may have very simple projects as a localization
editor.
I recommend using some of the third party localization tools available. I
haven't really reviewed any myself, but I believe that Passolo, Alchemy
Catalyst and SDL all have support for the .NET resource model. I think there
is another one as well called Visual Localize.
As for Winres, you can localize inherited forms, but the base assembly must
be installed in the GAC or in the same folder as Winres. You can find more
information about common Winres problem in this blog entry:
http://blogs.msdn.com/rprabhu/archiv.../21/56536.aspx
If you are experiencing other problems, please report them through the MSDN
Product Feedback Center at http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/ .
I haven't heard of anyone losing bitmaps, so that would be something that we
should look into fixing if it can be reproduced in our environment.
Winres is somewhat improved for 2005. We tried to make it more stable and
fix the common errors that people experience, however, it's still not a full
fledged localization tool so I would still recommend a commerical translation
tool.
Hope this helps,
Marin

"AndrewEames" wrote:

Thanks for the response.
I am aware of the workaround you mentioned for derived forms but there are
other issues.

Just to clarify on some of the problems I have had

1) WinRes wont open derived forms which have public sub controls in the base
form. I actually reported this bug and it is apparently fixed in 2005.

The remaining issues I haven't reported nor have I made a huge effort to
track them down but you might be interested in them

2) If I open a derived control in WinRes and save it in another language,
WinRes can't open the file it just saved.

3) If I open a .resx file wihch contains a picturebox with an image, when I
save it in another language, the image is gone

4) Controls with transparent backgrounds dont appear to be rendered correctly

5) Some 3rd party controls are not rendered correctly - in particular, the
SandBar menubar control

If you are unaware of these bugs, I'd be appy to try and make a repro if
they could get fixed in 2005!

I did try the Passolo tools briefly but they too seemed to have problems
rendering some controls as well as the fact they cost an arm and a leg.

Our application is relatively small and we'd be happy to use WinRes if it
worked reliably

Anyway, thanks for replying
Andrew Eames

"Marin Millar [Microsoft]" wrote:

Yes, sorry that is another known issue with 2003. I haven't heard of the
other problems, but I will see if I can repro them here. It would be great
if you have time to report 2, 3 & 4 in the product feedback center. It
really helps to have customer reports when trying to get bugs fixed. I'm not
sure about problem 5, but if you report it to the Sandbar owners, they can
contact us if they can identify the problem and we may be able to help find a
solution. Marin

"AndrewEames" wrote:

I am still investigating 2 & 3. But I realized that 4 is because color is
not a localizable property, so the that information is not included in the
..resx file. Therefore, there's no way to render color changes in Winres and
it falls back to the default colors. Thanks, Marin

"Marin Millar [Microsoft]" wrote:

I can't trivially reproduce 2 it must be something peculiar to my form

To reproduce 3, make a usercontrol, set localizable = true add a button
make an inherited user control, add a button to this control - name it
button2 and save the project

Run WinRes, open usercontrol2 and save it in spanish
Close winres, restart winres and try and open up the spanish file

You get an error message when opening the saved control
Error loading the dialog. Missing ZOrder information for the form or user
control....

While I was fiddling around with this, I found another bug - If UserControl1
and UserControl2 both contain a control with the same name (e.g. button1),
winres wont open the inherited control

Your point about color got me thinking though and explains why 5 was a
problem too. I'm using the LocalizationFilter component (which I think was
some MS sample code). Im using this for a couple of reasons - Primarily to
restrict what our localizers have access to so they can't screw up something
that they are not supposed to be editting but also its rumored that Forms
start up more quickly if they dont have to suck everything out of the
resources.

Along a similar vein (and this was my problem number 5) is that WinRes
simply cannot render some components correctly because they are not simple
controls with properties. A good example is the menubar - drop a menubar on a
form, add some menus and winres cannot render it.

Now that I understand that WinRes only renders things it sees in the .resx
file, I see there is a conflict of interest between wanting to minimze the
resources that go into the .resx file and wanting to have as accurate a view
of the application in WinRes as possible. I guess the bottom line is that
with the current architecture, WinRes simply cannot render a form/control in
the same way as it appears in the application
Andrew

"Marin Millar [Microsoft]" wrote:

See http://blogs.msdn.com/rprabhu/archiv...18/375975.aspx.

--
Raghavendra (Developer, .NET Client Team)
http://blogs.msdn.com/rprabhu

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