Enterprise Library Test Guide - Willy .Net

Testing for Globalization Best Practices 165
Execute and Analyze the Results
Execute the tests that comprise the test plan in addition to the pseudo- localization
tests. Here are some of the most common problems that may occur:
●
●
●
●
Special characters, such as question marks, ANSI characters, vertical bars, boxes,
and tildes, appear randomly on the display.
The application block returns data, such as dates, times, and currency, that is
incorrectly formatted.
The error messages, or other hard-coded strings, are not in accordance with the
current culture setting.
The application block displays incomplete messages or strings (in other words, the
application block loses data).
Usually, a simple code review reveals mistakes such as hard-coded strings, misuse
of an overloaded method that has culture or culture-related parameters, or an incorrectly
set culture-related property for the thread in which a call is executed. Here are
some specific issues.
●
●
●
If special characters appear on the display, there may be a problem with the
Unicode-to-ANSI conversion process. For example, a question mark may mean
that the Unicode-to-ANSI conversion is not using the correct conversion tables,
which are determined by the CultureInfo.LCID property. This property gets the
current culture identifier. If you are trying to convert Japanese Unicode strings to
ANSI on an English system, and if you do not explicitly specify the code page to
use, the system will use the default code page, which does not contain information
on how to convert the Japanese Unicode strings.
Incorrectly formatted data may indicate that the application block has methods
that do not use the current culture setting when they retrieve information.
If the application block displays incomplete messages or strings, the length of the
message or string may be too large in a non-English language for the application
block’s buffers.
For a complete list of globalization-related issues, see Globalization and Localization
Issues on MSDN.