Significant progress was made this week in converting to the new 2.0 .NET localization model in svn branches/2.1.1 so we will probably be able to make a new release in about 2 weeks. I still have some tweaking and testing to do and also still need to implement the keyboard shortcuts feature that is targeted for the 2.1.1 release.

The Culture*.config files will go away with this release and culture specific strings will come from App_GloabalResources/Resource*.resx files where the default english will be just Resource.resx, Russian will be Resource-ru.resx, and Mexican spanish will be Resource-es-MX.resx for example.

In the new model, the culture of the browser is detected and if there is a resource file for that culture it will be used, otherwise it will fall back to the default cutlure specified in the web.config. We will still use the /Data/MessageTemplate/*.config files which also have fallback to the default culture.

The new .resx file format is in a very readable xml format and can be edited with a text editor, though VS 2005 has a nicer built in editor. Going forward, anyone contributing translations should contribute them in .resx format plus message tamplate files.

Since the 2.1 release shipped last weekend, the new development branch in svn is branches/2.1.1 and changes will only be made in branches/2.1 if we have to make important bug fixes before the next planned release.

Of course content from the database is always in the language that it was entered in but labels, buttons, date formats etc will adapt to the user's browser. Hopefully I will update this site later this week from svn.