Going to I18n with our MFC Visual Studio C++ projects, we were considering several methods for organizing resources, (read here for details):
- Language-dependent binary
- One resource DLL for all languages
- One resource DLL per target language
I bet #2 is the best one, and here is how to organize .rc files and VS projects in the way good both: for machine and for humanity. Good for machine, because:
- DLLs would get compiled,
- Visual Studio resource editor would work with many-language resources the way it worked having only English ones, and
- there will be no TEXTINCLUDE section issue (read Cure for broken TEXTINCLUDE section of VC++ resource files )
- resources for all languages will be capable of manual editing with Visual Studio (thus you can keep resources synchronized among different languages),
- It would be possible to edit TEXTINCLUDE from VS GUI.
Plenty of time spent for investigation, reading docs, exploring existing projects and collegial disputes made it possible to get desired structure of VS C++ project and .rc files. This structure might be used as a template for other projects, and even might be an Ariadne's thread in localization labyrinth.
