Implementing localization and globalization
When building an application, we usually strive to reach as big an audience as possible. Localizing our application to different languages can surely help us boost our audience. Just like most .NET-based applications, localization in Silverlight is done through the use of resource files. Resource files are files based on key-value pairs where each pair represents a string, an image, or other types of resources such as audio and icons. We will discuss how to use resource files in just a moment. New to Silverlight 4 is the native support of right-to-left languages such as Arabic or Hebrew, which makes it far easier to localize an application to these languages. Other than strings, resource files can also hold dates or images.
Working with resource files
To get started, open the Chapter7-RESX project in Visual Studio 2010. The project can be found in the downloadable content of the book, which is available at www.packtpub.com.
The project's UI is...