Location and Localization - two new charms in the Telerik AJAX CarRental sample app

When we conferred internally (in the beginning of the current quarter) on the update of the AJAX Car Rental sample application, we asked ourselves the substantial question: How can we make this example even more useful for the developers? And going through the functionality it incorporated, we made the important deduction:

• Add car location, to make the vehicles more easily discoverable all over the world
  and
• Include localization to remove the language barrier for users that are not proficient in English.

For the first part the most natural choice was to choose to integrate our Silverlight RadMap control in the car detail screen. And voila!  It is already there, fine and dandy, automatically centering the location of the vehicle on the map for you. Plus, it is localized. But enough words, here is a quick screen dump for your visual pleasure:

For the second part we used the good old ASP.NET localization mechanism with resource (resx) files, placed in the App_GlobalResources folder of the web site. Thus the code implementation was kept virtually intact, and the appropriate localized resources were pulled out from the resource files storage. Note that our AJAX controls honor the current thread UI culture, hence no further modifications are needed to make them display the strings for their localizable elements in the pertinent language.

To select the language of your choice, we included a toolbar in the top right section of the page. Currently we strut localization in four languages (English, German, French and Bulgarian), but your can easily extend the set with more languages by creating resource files for them and placing them in sub-folders of the App_GlobalResources folder. It is as easy as that, no further code intervention is needed.

Finally, we reflected the additions on the About screen. And, as usual, the Clear skin which beautifies the demo as well as the updated source code of the application are there waiting you to download and play with them.

Do you find these nuggets useful? Have you explored the localization capabilities of our ASP.NET AJAX controls yet? I will be happy to hear opinions.

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