In order to have wider audience reach, we have the following famous authors’ blogs localized in Simplified Chinese and some other languages: S. Somasegar (Somasegar’s WebLog) [ English ] [ Japanese ] [ Simplified Chinese ] Jason Zander...

In this short blog, you will learn how to change the Date format in your Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™ 2011 application. By default, the Date format is controlled by the locale in your Control Panel. This will insure that the...

Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 was released in a limited set of languages, but the runtime is localized in more than 40 languages, namely: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish...

In this short blog, you will learn how to change the currency symbol for in your Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch ™ 2011 application. By default, the currency of the Money data type is set to dollar sign, for the English version...

In this blog post we will see how to write a coded UI test for a Hindi application. For this we will start with a simple Hindi WinForm application which takes two strings and concatenates them. The first string is entered into the first text...

One of the hottest topics in globalization is the topic of dates. Today we’ll see how we can use the DateTime class in the .NET framework to read and display different date values from different calendars. The actual DateTime value is independent...

XNA is a tool set with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that enables video game development and management. XNA attempts to bring different aspects of game production into a single system. XNA currently encompasses Microsoft's entire...

A satellite assembly is a compiled library (DLL) that contains (“localizable”) resources such as strings, bitmaps, etc. You are likely to use them when creating a multilingual (UI) application. Satellite assemblies provide you with the capability...

Just in case you missed it, Mango, the next version of Windows Phone will be even more internationally enabled. Support for East Asian languages At Mix 11, support for East Asian languages was announced. This has come about by a modified implementation...

WebMatrix has generated a lot of interest. It is a free tool that allows you to create, customize and publish websites. It’s easy to use, supports multiple platforms and the tool is free from Microsoft. You can download it from www.microsoft.com...

This week Garrett McGowan , a Senior PM from the Developer Division GDX team, provides background information on Windows Forms Localization and Localizability concepts, including the use of Auto Layout techniques. The video includes a live demo showing...

In his post Introducing xml:lang in XAML Mike Hedley discussed how that property plays an important role in linguistic services on WPF and Silverlight. If there is one take-away, it is that allowing it to default to "en-US" could have unintended consequences...

If you are interested in a history lesson, try this lengthy explanation. Actually, it is quite fascinating. If you are trying to make sure you app works worldwide, take a look below. Can you imagine if software like Microsoft Exchange did not take...

Awareness (India specific): Local language content always helps in enriching developers’ experience with the technology. Developers on Microsoft platforms have different community portals in different parts of the world. In India, the land of...

In this video, you will explore the different features of the Arabic language. First, we will add an Arabic Keyboard and start typing Arabic. Switch to right-to-left display and examine some Arabic character shaping characteristics, in addition to ligatures...

On July of 2010 the Indian government announced the new currency symbol for the Indian Rupee. The original Rupee symbol will still be used in various other countries. The Indian Ministry of IT has been working with the Unicode standards group to include...

In a previous post , I talked about converting Arabic digits. Today I’ll talk to you about shaping Arabic characters. Windows in general, performs the contextual shaping of Arabic characters as we type them. However some applications, especially...

In this short “how-to” video Andy Gonzalez , a PM from the Developer Division GDX team, shows you how to change the Display Language of Visual Studio. As always, stay tuned for more videos regarding globalization topics! We also recommend...

Warning: This post differs somewhat from our typical Global Developer blog posts. Rather than discussing a specific issue or technical topic related to developing global software, I want to introduce you to an exciting tool that I work on called Small...

Introducing xml:lang in XAML In a previous blog post I wrote about locales and cultures and described how you can use them to control the behavior and output of your programs to better match the regional expectations of your global users. Some of the...

Yomigana is a reading aid used in the Japanese language; it consists of smaller-sized syllabic characters (Kana or Romaji) printed beside an ideographic character (Kanji) to indicate its pronunciation. There are conventions to positioning this...

In addition to the previously launched Visual Studio 2010 International Survey in English , French , German , Italian , Japanese , Korean , Russian , Spanish , Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese , we have translated the survey into Brazilian Portuguese...

You may or may not have heard about IDN and are wondering about what it is. In this blog post I’ll introduce the concept of IDN. Most modern operating systems and applications natively support Unicode . However, both the DNS and SMTP protocols...

Unicode serves as the basis for the char data type in many modern programming languages, including Visual Basic .NET and C# . So what type of local language support do programming languages and frameworks need to provide? Support for international string...

Characters and Glyphs Characters are the written symbols that we use to communicate ideas (e.g., N, 9, Θ, Π, 語 , @). Glyphs are graphical representations of those characters. Code pages are tables of characters and fonts are tables of glyphs...