What is globalization in .NET?

Globalization refers to the process with which an application or software is designed and developed so as to make it run across all platforms and all sites with minimum or no modification to the software application. The software is very easy to customize so as to suit to the location-specific conditions and it is also capable of providing information based on the varied inputs and the location-specific operating system.

There are two processes in Globalization and they are customisation or localisation of the application and internationalizing the application codes so as to meet the standards of the local culture and other related matters.

In internationalization process the application code base is same and the efforts will be on jobs such as translating, storing, retrieving and to make the application user friendly for the selected locale. In any given place the culture and the language will always be different and besides this you should also take into account the other factors such as time zone, normal date pattern usage, cultural and language environments, currencies, telephone numbers, and so many other factors that are specific to the locale. In globalization the process of internationalization enables us to remove from the code base and the presentation layer all the contents and make you to use only a single presentation layer and single code base with a common contents that can suit any culture. The internationalization process will aid us to keep all the contents in a common place with an idea of making it easily accessible by the programme codes and the results can easily be populated all over presentation layer and the application with ease and efficiently.

Moreover, the internationalization process also enables you to store the contents and all the collected inputs from the user in a user friendly format and in a highly secured manner without compromising any standards pertaining to the local culture. The internationalization process is one step before any attempt for localising the application to suit to the local needs.

With the help of the localization process of globalization, you can make your application adaptable to the various location specific conditions and it will be easy for you to translate and re-format our application to suit to our new location and that too without changing any of the codes. Further, we can make use of the process for rectifying any of the reported bugs and for fine tuning the application for running efficiently. The globalization process also makes use of the locally prevailing information on culture where the software or the application is to be installed and maintained. The locational details and the language used in that particular area constitute to culture information and for working with any culture based information the namespace concept is utilised and the SystemGlobalization, SystemResources and SystemThreading are the available namespaces in .NET Framework.

Out of the various namespaces, the SystemGlobalization namespace constitute classes that are used to hold information relating to region or country, the local language used, type of calendars, date format used, numbers, currency, etc., all in a meticulously arranged fashion and all these classes are used while developing the globalized (internationalized) applications. We can use advanced globalization functionalities with the assistance of classes such as StringInfo and TextInfo classes and the various functionalities include text element processing and surrogate support systems.

The SystemResources namespace constitutes interfaces and classes that are very helpful for developers and maintenance experts in creating, storing, retrieving, and managing various resources used in the application that are culture and location-specific.

The SystemThreading namespace constitutes interfaces and classes that aid in multithreaded programming. The classes that are used in this type of SystemThreading namespace are also useful in accessing data and for synchronization of thread activities.