I'm looking into internationalisation for a project we're about to start. There are a few articles on how to localise label text etc on windows forms. But what about error messages that are displayed to the user.

I created a new resource file calles Messages.resx and this created a "code behind" CS file that allowed me to access each of the string resouces in the file. Cool so far. Once I had a few message texts in the resource file I copied it a few times to Messages.fr-FR.resx for France French, Mesages.fr.resx for default French, Messages.nb-NO.resx for Norwegian etc. Each of these resource files also had "code behind" CS files but they were empty. 

I set my UI culture before loading my form in my static void Main method like so:

System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo("fr-FR"); 

And to my surprise when I called Messages.M001 (M001 was name of the message in the resource file), it would attempt to get the text for message M001 in my Mesages.fr-FR.resx file. How cool is that?

Also interesting if I set my UI culture to fr-BE it would try to receive the text from the Messages.fr.resx file as I didn't have a Belgium specific resource file.

Any advice or tips on how to handle internationalisation would be most appreciated too.