Globalization - What Is It?
One definition for globalization puts it nicely: "A process of creating a product or service that will be successful in many countries without modification." Basically, as a web developer building a multi-national web application, you can utilize ASP.NET (and in this case ASP.NET AJAX) to automatically format dates, currency and other things according to the preferences of your visitors.
This article (and attached source code) will demonstrate how use globalization features to format a date and a numeric field using the extended functions added to JavaScript by ASP.NET AJAX.
Localization - What Is It?
This is similar to globalization, but it focuses on translating parts of your site (primarily the UI) based on the user’s culture (or language). Unlike globalization, with localization the translation itself is not done by ASP.NET. You will need to create "resource" files for each culture that you want to support. The job of ASP.NET AJAX is to detect the culture of the user coming to your site, and to show him the right text.
Keep in mind that both globalization and localization are not new concepts, and they are not new features to ASP.NET. The part of this that is new is the tie-in to JavaScript brought about by ASP.NET AJAX.
