Developing localized solutions on the SharePoint 2007 platform wasn’t as straight-forward as we wanted it to be. First of all you had to make your code support globalization and then you had to provision the localized Resource files to your Web Application. As SharePoint 2007 didn’t provide any mechanism to do that, you had to use custom Timer Jobs to get this done correctly. Luckily this situation has changed with SharePoint 2010 which introduces the new App_GlobalResourceFile element in the Solution Manifest which makes it possible to declaratively deploy Resource files in a structured and repeatable fashion.
Provisioning Resource files to your Web Application is very straight forward. All you have to do is to include your Resource file in the Solution using the App_GlobalResourceFile element, for example:
<Solution>
<ApplicationResourceFiles>
<App_GlobalResourceFile Location="MyResource.resx"/>
</ApplicationResourceFiles>
</Solution>
Using the snippet above will copy your resource file to the Web Application’s IIS directory\App_GlobalResources during the deployment process.
Provisioning the Resource files in SharePoint 2010 is even easier if you’re using the new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools. In such case all you have to do is to add an Empty Element SharePoint Project Item to your project and underneath it add your Resource file. As soon as you do that, the Resource file will allow you set additional property called Deployment Type. In order to deploy the Resource file to App_GlobalResources you have to set the value of the Deployment Type property to AppGlobalResource.
