In previous years, the Internationalization and Unicode Conference has been a place where important upcoming projects/products got announced.

For example, there was the 18th IUC in Hong Kong where Cathy Wissink and I snuck in a last minute presentation entitled "Unicode on Downlevel Windows" where a ho hum and boring presentation turned into the first public annoucement of the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Win9x Systems (MSLU).

And then there was the 23rd IUC in Prague where Cathy and I took an innocuous sounding talk entitled "Unicode and Keyboards on Windows" which turned into the surprise announcement of Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC).

Now that the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference in Washington, D.C. is over, I thought I'd mention that during my Thursday morning prseentation "Keyboards on Win32: Beyond the Keyboard Layout Creator" I did, I (among other things) got to announce that the update to MSKLC was happening!

I guess it really pays to show up at presentations I give and/or co-give at conferences, doesn't it? :-)

Major plans for the update:

  • Fix for the setup problems related to installing MSKLC on Vista (discussed here)
  • Support for Custom Locales on Vista (discussed here and other places)
  • Fix for the setup problems related to installing keyboard layouts on Vista (discussed here)
  • Support for layouts on IA64, AMD64/x64, and WOW64 (all common Vista) platforms (discussed here, here, here, here, and here plus other places)

I guess you could nickname the release MSKLC Vista and not be too far off, given the clear focus on Vista. And the plan is to get it out as close to the end of January Vista street date as we possibly can.

Lots of positive feedback from all the people I talked to there, and now everyone who reads here gets to hear about it (the folks who were willing to pay the price of hearing me blather got to find out almost 40 hours sooner!).

Other stuff also got mentioned, and I will be talking about all of it soon....

Are you excited yet? I am!

 

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