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This document describes the steps involved in creating a resource only DLL that will be responsible for supply country specific UI elements.

 First, a bit of review is in order. For those modules that have UI elements, some method for localization into country specific versions of the UI elements is required if the application is to be run on a world wide basis. There are a number of ways to accomplish this but the method I’ve found to be the least amount of trouble - and make no bones about it, all localization methods have something that is a pain in the the fundament to deal with - is the ‘satellite DLL’ method. A satellite DLL contains locale specific UI information that will be used by some main module. Each country gets its own DLL. When a module needs to display a string, dialog box or other UI element, it will draw this element from the resources of the appropriate locale specific DLL.

The production of locale specific resource only DLLs can be accomplished in a number of ways. Again, there is no 'best' way. There are issues with every single way that you can think of. I like to keep everything in a single project which uses different configurations to separate Release and Debug versions of country specific resources.

Because you get English Release and Debug configurations by default when you create a new project, those are the starting configurations. To those, we will want to add English _UNICODE. All other locales are strictly _UNICODE. If we want to provide support for English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish then we end up with four English configurations and an additional ten non-English configurations all tucked into a single project file.