Going to TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin ? Come and see my session (WEB307) How To Make your Silverlight 4 Application World Ready. This is the same session I'm doing at the 34th Internationalization and Unicode Conference (#IUC34, where it is called How To Achieve World-Ready Domination In Silverlight 4) and I did last night at the Silverlight UK User Group (where it was called Internationalizing Silverlight 4). Here's the abstract:-

So you've written your Silverlight application and you want it to work in another language ? Then this session is for you. World-Readiness is all of the work that a developer needs to do to globalize an application and make it localizable (i.e. capable of being localized). Whereas these concepts are well established in Windows Forms and ASP.NET, Silverlight is not only a cut-down version of the .NET Framework but also cross platform and client-side. In this session you will learn how to localize Silverlight applications using .resx files, download culture-specific resources on demand so that users only download resources for the culture they need, understand what System.Globalization types and properties Silverlight does not support and why, what globalization and font support you can expect on Windows and the Mac, what the Silverlight installation user experience is for non-English users and what language support you can expect from the Silverlight framework.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Internationalizing Silverlight 4 presentation at the Silverlight UK User Group last night. A particularly huge thanks to Mark Mann who provided a personalised and internationalized introduction to me. Never had something like this before and I was very impressed and touched. Best introduction ever.

Excellent chat in the pub afterwards too. Really enjoyed it ? thanks everyone.

The slides for the presentation are available at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/I18NSilverlight.zip. The source code is at http://www.guysmithferrier.com/Downloads/I18NSilverlightSource.zip.

Ian Smith took a video of the presentation which will be posted soon.

When Silverlight 2 was released I wrote a short document comparing the classes in the Silverlight System.Globalization namespace with those of the .NET Framework's same namespace. Last year I updated it for Silverlight 3 and now I have done the same again for Silverlight 4. Before you get too excited, however, the System.Globalization classes and their methods and properties in Silverlight 4 have not changed since Silverlight 3. That is not to say that there aren't internationalization changes in Silverlight 4 (right-to-left support being a very welcome addition), just that the classes themselves have not changed (not even to include TextInfo.IsRightToLeft). You can download the document here.

A few years ago I wrote a paper on "How To Give Great Presentations". Most of the information in this document is relatively timeless and so it needs little updating. I have uploaded an updated copy now which contains a few updates for more recent technologies referenced in the document as well as a few additional sections. The majority of the document is unchanged (it increased from 25 pages to 28 pages) but if you use it as a reference then you should download the updated copy.

DDD Dublin (the free community driven, one day conference) will be held on Saturday 9th October 2010. The Call For Speakers is now open and closes on 13th September 2010 followed by session voting and then the agenda being announced on Tuesday 21st September 2010. 'Reasonable' T&E for speakers are being covered. If you are part of the UK community and are keen to start speaking at bigger events this is a great opportunity.

I have updated the PublicResourceCodeGenerator (and all of the other code generators) so that it installs and works with Visual Studio 2010 (as well as Visual Studio 2008). The PublicResourceCodeGenerator is used to create Strongly Typed Resource Classes with a public class and a public constructor so that resx files can be used with Silverlight (you can read all about these code generators here). You can download an MSI/EXE and/or the source code (for Visual Studio 2010, 2008 and 2005) here.

The source code for my .NET Internationalization book is now available for Visual Studio 2010. Versions are still available for Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2003 but the version for Visual Studio 2010 is the only one that I will be updating from here on (until the next release of Visual Studio).