Accessing resource strings with CultureInfo in .NET

Question

Another simple questions. I have website with different languages. If I want to access a string from the resource file I would use it like this

Resources.MyResourceFile.MyStringIdentifier

Very easy. That way I know during compile time, that the resource string exists.

Now, this works only if I want to use the current Culture. Sometimes I need to specify a specific culture (let's say that the current user uses German as a language, but his action triggers messages to be sent to other users which will be in the recipient's language). Now, I see two options:

Resources.MyResourceFile.ResourceManager.GetString("MyStringIdentifier", neededCulturInfo)

The other would be to change the current thread's culture info which I would need to do several times.

Is there a third way? Something which tells me at compile time that the resources exist but without the need to change the thread's culture all the time?

Answer 1

(For your scenario) the idea of the ResourceManager is to provide culture specific informations at runtime not at compile time (aka side-by-side with fallback).
So the answer is "NO", there isn't a buildin way to determinate the existance of those resource files at compile time - to do so you would require a kind of "hard coding" for all strings in every single langauge and also code to access to those. The side by side idea is exactly the opposite of hardcoding ;)

What you could do, is writng a unit test for the resources, that itterates your langauges and checks if the default or a localized value was used. Further if you are using a source control system that provides check-in policies (e.g. TFS) you could this unit test as part of the check-in policy.