ELKs aren't roaming where the servers are

I have talked previously about the Enabling Language Kits in many posts, such as Lions and tigers and bearsELKs, Oh my! and ELK stampede! (and of course referred to them in many others).

They are an incredible way to enable a larger number of locales in Windows XP, a feature that adds unprecedented levels of locale support to the Windows platform.

Of course the very first question I remember being asked by developers working on the Office team:

How do you install them on Windows Server 2003?

The answer did admittedly shock them -- you don't.

(This apparently caused them some trouble since all of their developer machines were using Server 2003 -- prior to XP SP2 shipping, there was little doubt that the Server 2003 release was more secure!)

ELKs are for XP, and the data fornat of locale data does have some subtle differences that would make porting the ELK locales to Server 2003 difficult.

And since the most important reason for the ELK functionality is to support Language Interface Packs (which I talk about here), which do not have as a requirement support on servers, the extra effort that would be required could not be justified, especially since it would have taken away resources from both the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework and what we called at the time Longhorn.

Now I know that there are some "client" scenarios buried in the server, such as both web servers and terminal servers. But when you consider that you cannot install more than a single Language Interface Pack on a machine, it obviously is not a 'client' scenario to add LIP support, even in those 'client-like' scenarios.

In any case, a very careful triaging of the impact on everything we had (and have) to deliver was done, and all of these issues were considered.

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