RE: Enumerating available localized language resources in .NET

The coolest thing about the blog culture is people that respond to comments (and suggested topics). One person that consistently goes above the call is Michael Kaplan. On Friday, I asked a question via his contact me link, and by 9am Saturday he had grokked my question, found a solution, and blogged about it for the universe to share. This is awesome! Microsoft is lucky to have someone of Michael's caliber, and we are lucky to have him exposed and working on weekends for us.

Unfortunately, it's not all peaches and cream in .Net land. Frankly the solution he gave is suboptimal for my use (through no fault of Michael's). Let me explain my situation, the initial solution, the problems, and the eventual resolution

My requirements

Hard requirements

• I'm coding an ASP.Net 2.0 application
• The application has a select for the user to choose the language they want the application to be rendered in
• The selection is maintained in the ASP.Net Profile both for anonymous and logged-in users
• The selected language is used to force the servicing thread's CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture

Soft requirements

• We want to allow the setup user to define the locales they want in the list
• We want to default the list to all installed translations available to based on the installed .Net runtime language packs.

So, first step is to enumerate the CultureInfo objects like this (using a custom business object called Locale and WilsonORMapper)

public static void Fill()
{
    ObjectSpace space = Manager.ObjectSpace.IsolatedContext;
 
    using (Transaction transaction = space.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted))
    {
        Dictionary<string, Locale> locales = new Dictionary<string, Locale>();
 
        foreach (Locale existingLocale in space.GetCollection<Locale>(string.Empty))
        {
            locales.Add(existingLocale.LocaleCode, existingLocale);
        }
 
        // Grab a type that we know is in mscorlib
         Assembly mscorlib = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(System.Object));
 
        // Enumerate through all the languages .NET may be localized into
        foreach (CultureInfo ci in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
        {
            string name = ci.Name;

            if ( ! locales.ContainsKey(name))
            {
               Locale newLocale = new Locale();
               newLocale.LocaleCode = name;
               newLocale.Description = ci.NativeName;
               newLocale.InvariantDescription = ci.DisplayName;
               space.StartTracking(newLocale, InitialState.Inserted);
               locales.Add(name, newLocale);
            }
        }
 
        transaction.PersistChanges(locales.Values, PersistDepth.ObjectGraph);
        transaction.Commit();
    }
}

This is pretty simple. The problem is that I end up with more than 159 specific cultures (and 69 neutral cultures) available, only a few of which have localized .Net runtimes installed. This is where I searched and eventually punted to Micheal. He suggested that I can use the Assembly.GetSatelliteAssembly(CultureInfo ci) method to feel out the correct culture. He also changed his call to CultureInfo.GetCultures() to also include the CultureTypes.NeutralCultures enumeration flag.

Several problems with this approach pop up. Firstly, since we are calling GetSatelliteAssembly, it has to have a way to communicate when the assembly cannot be located. It does this by throwing a FileNotFoundException. That sucks because I'm going to get hundreds of exceptions for the 24 or so available localizations, and exceptions are a terrible performance hit (not to mention bad API design). This could be easily cured if Microsoft had exposed the (Reflectored) InternalGetSatelliteAssembly method, which takes a boolean flag to determine if it should throwOnFileNotFound. Alas, that isn't exposed and I certainly am not going to start twiddling the internal members of mscorlib. Another possibility is the tantalizing ResourceManager.TryLookingForSatellite(), but it's private as well.

The other problem with this is the fact that I am getting back neutral cultures. These are great when doing localizations because you can create an English translation without worrying about the differences between British English and United States English. This sucks because you cannot set the Thread.CurrentUICulture to any neutral culture (it wants you to be specific, and it'll thunk down to the neutral culture if needed). Thus I've got a tiny list of cultures of which only a couple are actually useable as-is.

Sigh... what to do? I take my hint from the path Michael has started down and do some more reflectoring. So after much digging, I find that the best I can do is catch is basically what Michael suggests, so I tried to minimize the number of exceptions thrown and solve the neutral/specific culture issue, so what I did was track the list of known installed neutral localizations and test the parents of each specific culture. The final code loos likes this:

// Grab a type that we know is in mscorlib
private static readonly Assembly s_MSCorLib = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(System.Object));
 
public static void Fill()
{
    ObjectSpace space = Manager.ObjectSpace.IsolatedContext;
 
    using (Transaction transaction = space.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted))
    {
        Dictionary<string, Locale> locales = new Dictionary<string, Locale>();
 
        foreach (Locale existingLocale in space.GetCollection<Locale>(string.Empty))
        {
            locales.Add(existingLocale.LocaleCode, existingLocale);
        }
 
        Dictionary<string, CultureInfo> neutralCultures = new Dictionary<string, CultureInfo>();
 
        // Enumerate through all the neutral cultures first (this saves time in checking all the others...)
        foreach (CultureInfo ci in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.NeutralCultures))
        {
            if (AddIt(locales, neutralCultures, ci))
            {
                neutralCultures.Add(ci.Name, ci);
            }
        }
 
        // Enumerate through all the specific languages .NET may be localized into
        foreach (CultureInfo ci in CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.SpecificCultures))
        {
            if (AddIt(locales, neutralCultures, ci))
            {
                // if we got here, the culture localizations are installed.
                Locale newLocale = new Locale();
                newLocale.LocaleCode = ci.Name;
                newLocale.Description = ci.NativeName;
                newLocale.InvariantDescription = ci.DisplayName;
                space.StartTracking(newLocale, InitialState.Inserted);
                locales.Add(ci.Name, newLocale);
            }
        }
 
        transaction.PersistChanges(locales.Values, PersistDepth.ObjectGraph);
        transaction.Commit();
    }
}
 
private static bool AddIt(Dictionary<string, Locale> locales
    , Dictionary<string, CultureInfo> neutralCultures
    , CultureInfo ci)
{
    bool addIt = false;
 
    if (!locales.ContainsKey(ci.Name))
    {
        // if it exists in neutral form, we can use it, special-case English since that is
        // always installed..
        if (neutralCultures.ContainsKey(ci.Name) || ci.TwoLetterISOLanguageName == "en")
        {
            addIt = true;
        }
        else
        {
            try
            {
                Assembly satellite = s_MSCorLib.GetSatelliteAssembly(ci);
                addIt = true;   // if we got here, the localization was found...
            }
            catch (FileNotFoundException)
            {
                if (ci.Parent != null && ci.Parent != CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)
                    addIt = AddIt(ref locales, ref neutralCultures, ci.Parent);
            }
        }
    }
 
    return addIt;
}