Language support, Unicode standard, Date and time storage – Keri Systems Doors.NET Manual User Manual

Page 167: Displaying translated software revisions

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Doors.NET Reference Manual

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Language Support

Doors.NET software is written in a native Microsoft .NET environment. The .NET Frame-
work provides extensive support for the development of world-ready applications. A truly
global application should be culture-neutral and language-neutral.

The common language runtime provides support for retrieving culture-specific resources
that are packaged and deployed in satellite assemblies. Satellite assemblies only con-
tain resource files, or loose resources such as .gif files. They do not contain any execut-
able code.

The .NET Framework uses Unicode UTF-16 (Unicode Transformation Format, 16-bit
encoding form) to represent characters.

Unicode Standard

The Unicode Standard is the universal character encoding scheme for characters and
text. It assigns a unique numeric value, called a code point, and name to each character
used in the written languages of the world. For example, the character "A" is represented
by the code point "U+0041" and the name "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A". Values are
available for over 65,000 characters and there is room to support up to one million more.
For more information, see The Unicode Standard at www.unicode.org.

Date and Time Storage

All date and time fields in Doors.NET are stored in the ISO 8601 date format (yyyyMMdd
HH:mm:ss). IS 8601 is in an international standard which gives several standard syn-
taxes for representing Gregorian dates and times.

Displaying Translated Software Revisions

When you start Doors.NET, it detects the language of your operating system and tries to
load the corresponding resource file. If it cannot find the resource file for your selected
language, the application defaults to US English. These resource files are in a sub-
directory for each language or language dialect. For example, the directory es-ES con-
tains the resource file for Spanish (Spain) and es-MX contains the resource file for
Spanish (Mexico). The resource files are also known as satellite assemblies.

This approach using satellite assemblies allows languages to be added or changed
without a different version of the software to be compiled. In other words, new features
are available to the non-English customers without having to wait for a localized (and
possibly different) compiled version.

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