Best Practices for Developing World-Ready Applications

Technical Issues

Developers can reduce their development time on almost any international application by considering the following issues prior to the start of the development cycle:

• Use Unicode as your character encoding to represent text. If you cannot use Unicode, you will need to implement DBCS enabling, bi-directional (BiDi) enabling, code page switching, text tagging, and so on.
• Consider implementing a multilingual user interface. If you design the user interface to open in the default UI language and offer the option to change to other languages, users of the same machine who speak different languages reduce down time related to software configuration. This may be a particularly useful strategy in regions such as Belgium with more than one culture/locale and official language.
• Watch for Windows messages that indicate changes in the input language, and use that information for spell checking, font selection, and so on.
• If you are developing for Windows 2000, test your application on all language variants of Windows 2000, using all possible cultures/locales. Windows 2000 supports the languages used in more than 120 cultures/locales.

Underutilized Features of .NET

1. ObsoleteAttribute

ObsoleteAttribute applies to all program elements except assemblies, modules, parameters, and return values. Marking an element as obsolete informs users that the element will be removed in future versions of the product.
Message property contains a string that will be displayed when the attribute assignee is used. It is recommended a workaround to be provided in this description.
IsError– If set to true the compiler will indicate an error if the attribute target is used in the code.

public static class ObsoleteExample
{
    // Mark OrderDetailTotal As Obsolete.
    [ObsoleteAttribute("This property (DepricatedOrderDetailTotal) is obsolete. Use InvoiceTotal instead.", false)]
    public static decimal OrderDetailTotal
    {
        get
        {
            return 12m;
        }
    }

    public static decimal InvoiceTotal
    {
        get
        {
            return 25m;
        }
    }

    // Mark CalculateOrderDetailTotal As Obsolete.
    [ObsoleteAttribute("This method is obsolete. Call CalculateInvoiceTotal instead.", true)]
    public static decimal CalculateOrderDetailTotal()
    {
        return 0m;
    }

    public static decimal CalculateInvoiceTotal()
    {
        return 1m;
    }
}