Programmatic way to get all the available languages (in satellite assemblies)

Question

I'm designing a multilingual application using .resx files.

I have a few files like GlobalStrings.resx, GlobalStrings.es.resx, GlobalStrings.en.resx, etc. When I want to use this, I just need to set Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.

The problem: I have a combobox with all the available languages, but I'm loading this manually:

comboLanguage.Items.Add(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en"));
comboLanguage.Items.Add(CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("es"));

I've tried with

cmbLanguage.Items.AddRange(CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.UserCustomCulture));

without any success. Also tried with all the elements in CultureTypes, but I'm only getting a big list with a lot more languages that I'm not using, or an empty list.

Is there any way to get only the supported languages?

Answer 1

You can programatically list the cultures available in your application

// Pass the class name of your resources as a parameter e.g. MyResources for MyResources.resx
ResourceManager rm = new ResourceManager(typeof(MyResources));

CultureInfo[] cultures = CultureInfo.GetCultures(CultureTypes.AllCultures);
foreach (CultureInfo culture in cultures)
{
    try
    {
        ResourceSet rs = rm.GetResourceSet(culture, true, false);
        // or ResourceSet rs = rm.GetResourceSet(new CultureInfo(culture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName), true, false);
        string isSupported = (rs == null) ? " is not supported" : " is supported";
        Console.WriteLine(culture + isSupported);
    }
    catch (CultureNotFoundException exc)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(culture + " is not available on the machine or is an invalid culture identifier.");
    }
}