Summary

This chapter described the new localization features of ASP.NET 2.0. Automatic resource generation, implicit and explicit localization expressions, strongly typed, dynamically compiled global resources, and good Visual Studio designer support can all greatly speed up the implementation of localization support in your web site. The "Solution" section of this chapter was fairly short because you only need to follow a few simple steps, repeating them for all the pages you want to localize. It only took me a couple of hours to fully localize the site's common layout and the home page. I know from personal experience that this would have taken much longer with the previous version of ASP.NET and, of course, infinitely longer with even older technologies. If this power and flexibility still isn't enough for your needs, I invite you to go deeper and study the provider model for localization, which enables you to store and retrieve resources to and from any data store you prefer.

Now that the site is 100% feature complete, you can start thinking about its packing, distribution, and publication to the Internet for global usage. The next chapter shows you how to deploy the site to both a shared hosted server and a dedicated server under your control, and how to create redistributable installers for packaged applications.