Internationalizing Desktop App within a couple years… What should we do now?

Question

So we are sure that we will be taking our product internationally and will eventually need to internationalize it. How much internationalizing would you recommend we do as w

Answer 1

Internationalization will let your product be usable in other countries, it's easy and should be done from the start (this way English speaking people all over the world can use your software), those 3 rules will get you most of the way there:

1. Support international characters - use only Unicode data types in files and databases.
2. Support international date, time and number formats - use CultureInfo.InvariantCulture when storing data to file or computer readable storage, use CultureInfo.CurrentCulture when displaying data or parsing user input, never do your own parsing, never use any other culture objects.
3. textual data entered by the user should be considered a black box, don't try to break it up into words or letters, especially when displaying it to the user - different languages have diffract rules and the OS knows how to display left-to-right text, you don't.

Localization is translating the software into different languages, this is difficult and expensive, a good start is to never hard code strings and never build sentences out of smaller strings.