My Free .NET Resource File Management Tool: Shen Resources Tool

This is a tool I developed to assist in the development of multilingual user interfaces for .NET applications. Although many years have passed, I still use it, and I hope it will be useful to you as well. 😀

You can download and use it for free from my website:
https://sr.shenlivechat.com.

To enable multi-language support in software, .NET provides resource files to store different language resources, which are then loaded and used in the program. However, for large projects or team development—especially with continuously evolving versions—multi-language development can become extremely cumbersome, leading to many uncontrollable issues, such as:

1. The traditional way of retrieving resources relies on string-based keys, which can result in spelling errors when developers access resources.
2. When modifying resource files, existing resource identifiers may be changed without being properly synchronized across the program.
3. During resource file modifications, existing entries may be mistakenly deleted, or entries assumed to be unused may still be needed elsewhere.
4. It is difficult to determine the usage status of a resource: whether it is still in use and whether it is used in multiple places.
5. When adding new language resources, ensuring full synchronization across all languages becomes challenging, especially when there are a large number of resources with frequent updates.

If resource keys are referenced as strings, none of these issues can be detected at compile time, making errors difficult to identify.

Additionally, two more challenges make resource file management particularly troublesome during development:

1. In Visual Studio, resource files can only be edited one by one in separate windows. For instance, if you have both English and Japanese resource files, you must open two independent windows for editing. More importantly, Visual Studio does not check whether the entries in both resource files match. There is no linkage or mapping between them, meaning discrepancies such as missing or extra entries, or case-sensitive key mismatches, go unnoticed.

2. There is no efficient way to coordinate with translators for tasks such as resource import, export, and automatic validation. There is no reliable way to hand off language resources to translators and then re-import them while ensuring that thousands of resource entries have no omissions or inconsistencies.

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Here is an introduction to my tool:

Supports Google automatic translation.

Generate .NET code and resource files, and use a single interface to constrain and invoke them.

Generate JSON files for referencing them in a Web project.

Export to or import from an Excel file to facilitate the work of translators.

You can download and use it for free from my website:

https://sr.shenlivechat.com.