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No App_[Local|Global]Resources support in Web Application Projects?

I did some research back in the beta days of VS2005 for upgrading our existing site to take advantage of a bunch of different features that we had either written custom code or used third party code for. One of those features was localization/globalization. I had spent a bunch of time writing custom resourcing support into our existing ASP.NET 1.1 app that very closely mimic’d what ASP.NET 2.0 and Web Site Projects were going to offer. I have a LocalResources directory per sub-directory that contains all our resx files and then I have a bunch of functions that understand how to resolve those resources based on the page/control type name and then we use DataBinding syntax in our code-in-front to get those resources into our UI elements.

Anyway, Web Site Projects supports this concept through the App_LocalResources directory. You plop your resx files in there and then they get compiled into the correct resource path. Then in your ASP.NET code you either use an explicit Resource expression or the meta:resourcekey attribute to populate your page/control with content. You can read all about it here on MSDN.

Unfortunately it seems that Web Application Projects still don’t support this feature even in the latest RC drop. They do have support for App_Data, App_Browsers and App_Themes (even though it’s named Theme on the context menu right now)… so I’m just hoping App_[Local|GlobalResources] support is forthcoming.

FWIW, I posted in the ASP.NET forums about this if anyone is interested in voicing their opinion for support of this feature. Perhaps it’s all smoke and mirrors and I really only need to create a regular old directory named App_LocalResources for it to all work, so I’m looking into this. As for now, I am waiting for a response to my post with bated breath. 🙂

Update 4/19:

I received a response to my post from the individual at MS who is working on these features. The good news is support is coming, but definitely check out the post for the details.

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  1. Marc,

    Well, I hadn’t actually tried just putting the folders there. I kinda just balked when I went to add a new ASP.NET folder and didn’t see them there.

    As I said in the post, I guess a lot of it is just smoke and mirrors and will work just fine without the concept being baked into the project type.

    FYI, I got a follow up from the MS person working on it, I’m gonna make an update to the post with a link.

    Cheers,
    Drew