Multi-Language Add-In for Visual Studio

Posted by Phil on Thu 22 of Mar, 2012 20:35 GMT

I'm not clear whether you are trying to localize an attribute with my Add-In, or just looking for way to localize attributes.

This is how it works with the Add-In.

Suppose I have a property, with some attributes:

<Category("General")> _
<DisplayName("Help file")> _
<Description("This is the location of the help file for the Add-In")> _
Public Property HelpFileName As String
  Get
    return mHelpFileName
  End Get
  Set ( ByVal NewName As String )
    mHelpFileName = NewName
  End Set    
End Property

The three attributes here are ones which you might use with a PropertyGrid. I think that this is probably the most common reason to want to localize attributes.

To localize these attributes, the Add-In automatically generates some wrapper classes. Here are the definitions in VB. If you are using C#, the Add-In will generate equivalent definitions in C#.

Friend Class ml_DescriptionAttribute
  Inherits System.ComponentModel.DescriptionAttribute
  Sub New ( ByVal StringID As Integer, ByVal text As String )
    MyBase.New ( ml_string ( StringID, text ) )
  End Sub
End Class

Friend Class ml_CategoryAttribute
  Inherits System.ComponentModel.CategoryAttribute
  Sub New ( ByVal StringID As Integer, ByVal text As String )
    MyBase.New ( ml_string ( StringID, text ) )
  End Sub
End Class

Friend Class ml_DisplayNameAttribute
  Inherits System.ComponentModel.DisplayNameAttribute
  Sub New ( ByVal StringID As Integer, ByVal text As String )
    MyBase.New ( ml_string ( StringID, text ) )
  End Sub
End Class

Then the Add-In will replace the original attributes with the new ones:

<ml_Category(1738,"General")> _
<ml_DisplayName(1739,"Help file")> _
<ml_Description(1740,"This is the location of the help file for the Add-In")> _
Public Property HelpFileName As String
  Get
    return mHelpFileName
  End Get
  Set ( ByVal NewName As String )
    mHelpFileName = NewName
  End Set    
End Property

The new attributes are simply wrappers on the original attributes, but they are able to fetch the localized name in the constructor.

You can't simply replace the original string with a call to ml_string(), or a resource name because it won't compile.

If you are not using the Add-In, and you want to specify a resource string in the attribute definition, you could write an alternative wrapper class, e.g. res_CategoryAttribute, which takes the resource name as a parameter to the constructor.

I hope that that makes some sense.

By the way, version 5 of the Add-In supports named resources as an alternative to the ml_string() function, but I haven't extended this support to Attributes yet.

Phil

Hi,

I recorded my desktop to demonstrate my steps, what is missing to make it work?

http://arquivos.onixsat.com.br/rastreamento/enterprise/eval/jollans/info.html