Scott sits down with Brandon Watson, a Director on Windows Phone. He works with the Developer Community, but what does that really mean? What is Community vs. Evangelism vs. Marketing vs. Authenticity? Scott pushes on this point to better understand his own job at Microsoft
Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface and developer tools, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NETAJAX,MVC,Silverlight, Windows Forms and WPF. Enjoy developer tools like .NET Reporting, ORM, Automated Testing Tools, Agile Project Management Tools, and Content Management Solution. And now you can increase your productivity with JustCode, Telerik’s new productivity tool for code analysis and refactoring. Visit www.telerik.com.
As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)
Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
I was working on my Mac today and while I maintain that the OS X finder is as effective as shooting your hands fill of Novocaine, I remain envious of the simplicity of their Terminal. Not much interesting has happened in the command prompt world in Windows since, well, ever. I actually blogged about text mode as a missed opportunityin 2004. That post is still valid today, I think. Text is fast. I spend lots of time there and I will race anyone with a mouse, any day.
I blogged about Console2 as a better prompt for CMD.exe in 2005. Here we are 6 years later and I hopped over there to see Console2 was still being developed. They were on build 122 then, and they are, magically and to their extreme credit, still around and on build 147. Epic.
Open Source projects may be done, but they are never dead.
Here's how I set it up for my default awesomeness.
Right-click in the main console and click Edit | Settings.
Under Console, set your default Startup Directory
Under Appearance|More, hide the menu, status bar and toolbar.
Under Appearance, set the font to Consolas 15. Not 14, not 16. Black background, Kermit green foreground color.
Set Window Transparency to a nice conservative 40 for both Active and Inactive. Not too in your face, but enough glassiness to say "I'm a subtle badass."
Under Behavior set "Copy on Select"
Under Hotkeys, change the New Tab 1 hotkey to Ctrl-T because that's what it should be. You'll have to click on the hotkey, then in the textbox, then type the hot-key you want AND press Assign for it to stick.
Under Hotkeys, change Copy Selection to Ctrl-C and Paste to Ctrl-V then rejoice and wonder why Windows doesn't work like this today. At this point, you may want to device if you want "Copy on Select" to happen automatically under Behavior. That'll save you the Control-C if you like.
Now, the subtlety. Under Tabs, you (if you are me) want two default tabs, one for CMD.EXE and one for PowerShell because you don't like your peas and carrots to touch on your plate.
Set your Console|cmd.exe first tab to this shell if you want it to be a Visual Studio command prompt. Be aware of the PATH if you are not on x64 like I am.
%comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" x86
You'll have a nice "New Tab" option where you can make one of either shell. Note the general loveliness of this understated shell. I can open a new Tab with Ctrl-T (or lots) and use Ctrl-Tab to move between them. I took the screenshot with the background so you can see the transparency.
One final reason why Console2 rocks? It's freaking resizable in two directions, unlike the Windows CMD.exe console.
Console2 is a great little front-end for your existing shell, no matter what it is. Note that Console2 isn't a shell itself, it's just a face on whatever you are already using. Enjoy.
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
Tables turned this week and Rey Bango interviews Scott on his personal systems of organization. How has Scott synthesized the systems of Stephen Covey, David Allen, J.D. Meier and the Pomodoro Technique into a living system that works for him.
Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface and developer tools, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NETAJAX, MVC,Silverlight, Windows Forms and WPF. Enjoy developer tools like .NET Reporting, ORM, Automated Testing Tools, Agile Project Management Tools, and Content Management Solution. And now you can increase your productivity with JustCode, Telerik’s new productivity tool for code analysis and refactoring. Visit www.telerik.com.
As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)
Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
Sometimes the most interesting conversations happen before or after the show. Often they happen with Jeff Atwood. I (Scott) called Jeff to get some audio for our other show http://thisdeveloperslife.com and was recording as soon as Jeff and I started chatting. Here's our unedited random personal phone call that I thought might be fun
To be clear: This was a personal conversation before we recorded an episode of This Developer's Life. I thought it'd be interesting to share. I did beep out the swear words. Sorry if that offends.
Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface and developer tools, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NETAJAX, MVC,Silverlight, Windows Forms and WPF. Enjoy developer tools like .NET Reporting, ORM, Automated Testing Tools, Agile Project Management Tools, and Content Management Solution. And now you can increase your productivity with JustCode, Telerik’s new productivity tool for code analysis and refactoring. Visit www.telerik.com.
As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)
Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
There are several books worth of information to be said about Internationalization (i18n) out there, so I can't solve it all in a blog post. Even 9 pages of blog posts. I like to call it Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn, actually.
There's a couple of basic things to understand though, before you create a multilingual ASP.NET application. Let's agree on some basic definitions as these terms are often used interchangeably.
Internationalization (i18n) - Making your application able to support a range of languages and locales
Localization (L10n) - Making your application support a specific language/locale.
Globalization - The combination of Internationalization and Localization
Language - For example, Spanish generally. ISO code "es"
Locale - Mexico. Note that Spanish in Spain is not the same as Spanish in Mexico, e.g. "es-ES" vs. "es-MX"
Culture and UICulture
The User Interface Culture is a CultureInfo instance from the .NET base class library (BCL). It lives on Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture and if you felt like it, you could set it manually like this:
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new CultureInfo("es-MX");
The CurrentCulture is used for Dates, Currency, etc.
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("es-MX");
However, you really ought to avoid doing this kind of stuff unless you know what you're doing and you really have a good reason.
The user's browser will report their language preferences in the Accept-Languages HTTP Header like this:
See how I prefer en-US and then en? I can get ASP.NET to automatically pass those values and setup the threads with with the correct culture. I need to set my web.config like this:
...snip...
That one line will do the work for me. At this point the current thread and current UI thread's culture will be automatically set by ASP.NET.
The Importance of Pseudointernationalization
Back in 2005 I updated John Robbin's Pseudoizer (and misspelled it then!) and I've just ported it over to .NET 4 and used it for this application. I find this technique for creating localizable sites really convenient because I'm effectively changing all the strings within my app to another language which allows me to spot strings I missed with the tedium of translating strings.
Cool, eh? If you're working with RESX files a lot, be sure to familiarize yourself with the resgen.exe command-line tool that is included with Visual Studio and the .NET SDK. You have this on your system already. You can move easily between the RESX XML-based file format and a more human- (and translator-) friendly text name=value format like this:
During development time I like to add this Pseudoizer step to my Continuous Integration build or as a pre-build step and assign the resources to a random language I'm NOT going to be creating, like Polish (with all due respect to the Poles) so I'd make examplestrings.pl.resx and the then we can test our fake language by changing our browser's UserLanguages to prefer pl-PL over en-US.
Localization Fallback
Different languages take different amounts of space. God bless the Germans but their strings will take an average of 30% more space than English phrases. Chinese will take 30% less. The Pseudoizer pads strings in order to illustrate these differences and encourage you to take them into consideration in your layouts.
Localization within .NET (not specific to ASP.NET Proper or ASP.NET MVC) implements a standard fallback mechanism. That means it will start looking for the most specific string from the required locale, then fallback continuing to look until it ends on the neutral language (whatever that is). This fallback is handled by convention-based naming. Here is an older, but still excellent live demo of Resource Fallback at ASPAlliance.
For example, let's say there are three resources. Resources.resx, Resources.es.resx, and Resources.es-MX.resx.
Consider these three files in a fallback scenario. The user shows up with his browser requesting es-MX. If we ask for HelloString, he'll get the most specific one. If we ask for GoodbyeString, we have no "es-MX" equivalent, so we move up one to just "es." If we ask for DudeString, we have no es strings at all, so we'll fall all the way back to the neutral resource.
Using this basic concept of fallback, you can minimize the numbers of strings you localize and provide users with not only language specific strings (Spanish) but also local (Mexican Spanish) strings. And yes, I realize this is a silly example and isn't really representative of Spaniards or Mexican colloquial language.
Views rather than Resources
If you don't like the idea of resources, while you will still have to deal with some resources, you could also have difference views for different languages and locales. You can structure your ~/Views folders like Brian Reiter and others have. It's actually pretty obvious once you have bought into the idea of resource fallback as above. Here's Brian's example:
But you get the idea. You can set override cookies, check those first, then check the UserLanguages header. It depends on the experience you're looking for and you need to hook it up between the client and server
Globalized JavaScript Validation
If you're doing a lot of client-side work using JavaScript and jQuery, you'll need to get familiar with the jQuery Global plugin. You may also want the localization files for things like the DatePicker and jQuery UI on NuGet via "install-package jQuery.UI.i18n."
Turns out the one thing you can't ask your browser via JavaScript is what languages it prefers. That is sitting inside an HTTP Header called "Accept-Language" and looks like this, as it's a weighted list.
en-ca,en;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.6,de-de;q=0.4,de;q=0.2
We want to tell jQuery and friends about this value, so we need access to it from the client side in a different way, so I propose this.
This is Cheesy - use Ajax
We could do this, with a simple controller on the server side:
public class LocaleController : Controller { public ActionResult CurrentCulture() { return Json(System.Threading.Thread.Current.CurrentUICulture.ToString(), JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); } }
And then call it from the client side. Ask jQuery to figure it out, and be sure you have the client side globalization libraries you want for the cultures you'll support. I downloaded all 700 jQuery Globs from GitHub. Then I could make a quick Ajax call and get that info dynamically from the server. I also include the locales I want to support as scripts like /Scripts/globinfo/jquery.glob.fr.js. You could also build a dynamic parser and load these dynamically also, or load them ALL when they show up on the Google or Microsoft CDNs as a complete blob.
But that is a little cheesy because I have to make that little JSON call. Perhaps this belongs somewhere else, like a custom META tag.
Slightly Less Cheesy - Meta Tag
Why not put the value of this header in a META tag on the page and access it there? It means no extra AJAX call and I can still use jQuery as before. I'll create an HTML helper and use it in my main layout page. Here's the HTML Helper. It uses the current thread, which was automatically set earlier by the setting we added to the web.config.
namespace System.Web.Mvc { public static class LocalizationHelpers { public static IHtmlString MetaAcceptLanguage(this HtmlHelper html) { var acceptLanguage = HttpUtility.HtmlAttributeEncode(Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.ToString()); return new HtmlString(String.Format("",acceptLanguage)); } } }
I use this helper like this on the main layout page:
@Html.MetaAcceptLanguage()
...
And the resulting HTML looks like this. Note that this made-up META tag would be semantically different from the Content-Language or the lang= attributes as it's part of the the parsed HTTP Header that ASP.NET decided was our current culture, moved into the client.
Now I can access it with similar code from the client side. I hope to improve this and support dynamic loading of the JS, however preferCulture isn't smart and actually NEEDS the resources loaded in order to make a decision. I would like a method that would tell me the preferred culture so that I might load the resources on-demand.
So what? Now when I am on the client side, my validation and JavaScript is a little smarter. Once jQuery on the client knows about your current preferred culture, you can start being smart with your jQuery. Make sure you are moving around non-culture-specific data values on the wire, then convert them as they become visible to the user.
var price = $.format(123.789, "c"); jQuery("#price").html('12345');
var date = $.format(new Date(1972, 2, 5), "D"); jQuery("#date").html(date);
var units = $.format(12345, "n0"); jQuery("#unitsMoved").html(units);
Now, you can apply these concepts to validation within ASP.NET MVC.
Globalized jQuery Unobtrusive Validation
Adding onto the code above, we can hook up the globalization to validation, so that we'll better understand how to manage values like 5,50 which is 5.50 for the French, for example. There are a number of validation methods you can hook up, here's number parsing.
$(document).ready(function () { //Ask ASP.NET what culture we prefer, because we stuck it in a meta tag var data = $("meta[name='accept-language']").attr("content") //Tell jQuery to figure it out also on the client side. $.global.preferCulture(data);
//Tell the validator, for example, // that we want numbers parsed a certain way! $.validator.methods.number = function (value, element) { if ($.global.parseFloat(value)) { return true; } return false; } });
If I set my User Languages to prefer French (fr-FR) as in this screenshot:
Then my validation realizes that and won't allow 5.50 as a value, but will allow 5,50, given this model:
public class Example { public int ID { get; set; } [Required] [StringLength(30)] public string First { get; set; } [Required] [StringLength(30)] public string Last { get; set; } [Required] public DateTime BirthDate { get; set; } [Required] [Range(0,100)] public float HourlyRate { get; set; } }
I'll see this validation error, as the client side knows our preference for , as a decimal separator.
NOTE: It seems to me that the [Range] attribute that talks to jQuery Validation doesn't support globalization and isn't calling into the localized methods so it won't work with the , and . decimal problem. I was able to fix this problem by overriding the range method in jQuery like this, forcing it to use the global implementation of parseFloat. Thanks to Kostas in the comments on this post for this info.
jQuery.extend(jQuery.validator.methods, { range: function (value, element, param) { //Use the Globalization plugin to parse the value var val = $.global.parseFloat(value); return this.optional(element) || (val >= param[0] && val <= param[1]); } });
Here it is working with validity...
And here it is in a Danish culture working with [range]:
I can also set the Required Attribute to use specific resources and names and localized them from an ExampleResources.resx file like this:
public class Example { public int ID { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessageResourceType=typeof(ExampleResources), ErrorMessageResourceName="RequiredPropertyValue")] [StringLength(30)] public string First { get; set; } ...snip...
And see this:
NOTE: I'm looking into how to set new defaults for all fields, rather than overriding them individually. I've been able to override some with a resource file that has keys called "PropertyValueInvalid" and "PropertyValueRequired" then setting these values in the Global.asax, but something isn't right.
Since I know what the current jQuery UI culture is, I can use it to dynamically load the resources I need for the DatePicker. I've installed the "MvcHtml5Templates" NuGet library from Scott Kirkland so my input type is "datetime" and I've added this little bit of JavaScript that says, do we support dates? Are we non-English? If so, go get the right DatePicker script and set it's info as the default for our DatePicker by getting the regional settings given the current global culture.
//Setup datepickers if we don't support it natively! if (!Modernizr.inputtypes.date) { if ($.global.culture.name != "en-us" && $.global.culture.name != "en") { var datepickerScriptFile = "/Scripts/globdatepicker/jquery.ui.datepicker-" + $.global.culture.name + ".js"; //Now, load the date picker support for this language // and set the defaults for a localized calendar $.getScript(datepickerScriptFile, function () { $.datepicker.setDefaults($.datepicker.regional[$.global.culture.name]); }); } $("input[type='datetime']").datepicker(); }
Then we set all input's with type=datetime. You could have used a CSS class if you like as well.
Now our jQuery DatePicker is French.
Right to Left (body=rtl)
For languages like Arabic and Hebrew that read Right To Left (RTL) you'll need to change the dir= attribute of the elements you want flipped. Most often you'll change the root element to or change it with CSS like:
div { direction:rtl; }
The point is to have a general strategy, whether it be a custom layout file for RTL languages or just flipping your shared layout with either CSS or an HTML Helper. Often folks put the direction in the resources and pull out the value ltr or rtl depending.
Conclusion
Globalization is hard and requires actual thought and analysis. The current JavaScript offerings are in flux and that's kind.
A lot of this stuff could be made boilerplate or automatic, but much of it is a moving target. I'm currently exploring either a NuGet package that sets stuff up for you OR a "File | New Project" template with all the best practices already setup and packaged into one super-package. What's your preference, Dear Reader?
The Complete Script
Here's my current "complete" working script that could then be moved into its own file. This is a work in progress, to be sure. Please forgive any obvious mistakes as I'm still learning JavaScript.
<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
//Ask ASP.NET what culture we prefer, because we stuck it in a meta tag
Open Source Projects TO WATCH: New Internationalization ASP.NET MVC project from Daniel Crenna called "i18n" on GitHub: https://github.com/danielcrenna/i18n From his site:
Globally recognized interface; localize like the big kids
Localizes everything; views, controllers, validation attributes, and even routes!
SEO-friendly; language selection varies the URL, and Content-Language is set appropriately
Automatic; no routing changes required, just use an alias method where you want localization
Smart; knows when to hold them, fold them, walk away, or run, based on i18n best practices
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
Scott sits down with Brandon Watson, a Director on Windows Phone. He works with the Developer Community, but what does that really mean? What is Community vs. Evangelism vs. Marketing vs. Authenticity? Scott pushes on this point to better understand his own job at Microsoft
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Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface and developer tools, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET AJAX,MVC,Silverlight, Windows Forms and WPF. Enjoy developer tools like .NET Reporting, ORM, Automated Testing Tools, Agile Project Management Tools, and Content Management Solution. And now you can increase your productivity with JustCode, Telerik’s new productivity tool for code analysis and refactoring. Visit www.telerik.com.
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Tables turned this week and Rey Bango interviews Scott on his personal systems of organization. How has Scott synthesized the systems of Stephen Covey, David Allen, J.D. Meier and the Pomodoro Technique into a living system that works for him.
Sometimes the most interesting conversations happen before or after the show. Often they happen with Jeff Atwood. I (Scott) called Jeff to get some audio for our other show http://thisdeveloperslife.com and was recording as soon as Jeff and I started chatting. Here's our unedited random personal phone call that I thought might be fun_3.png "Language Preference Dialog preferring French")
