Team Foundation Internationalization
Hi there, I’m Aldo Donetti the International Program Manager for Visual Studio Team System. Today I’d like to introduce you to a couple of aspects related to the internationalization of Team Foundation – (1) how to properly configure it at setup time to support international data and (2) how to localize the Team Foundation server to provide the best possible experience to your teams. In addition you’ll find below some considerations on the client/server language mix scenario.
Language mix considerations
Most of you know that Visual Studio is currently localized into 9 languages (English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Italian). Team Foundation will be localized in the same languages, but it has not been designed to be multilingual in its first release, therefore system administrators will have to select one language for the server.
In a distributed/multilingual organization it might not be uncommon to have users installing Visual Studio in their favorite language. Most of the User Interface is stored on the client, but not all of it. A number of error messages come from the server and will show up in the language of the Team Foundation Server installed. Or else, in case of server exceptions, the call stack is provided by the .NET Framework in whatever language it was installed on the server and this would be pushed to the client, though we always wrap exceptions in a user friendly way. It’s easy to understand why a fully localized experience will be achieved only if both the Team Foundation server language and the Visual Studio client language match.
Setting up your server to support international data
Most of the international issues you might have to deal with can be avoided by properly installing and configuring SQL Server on the Team Foundation server. Because some of these changes are hard to undo, you should plan the usage scenarios of your Team Foundation server in advance.
You should at least take into consideration the natural language your teams will be using and set the collation accordingly, because it will obviously affect sorting. Based on the language you plan to use, you might also want to appropriately set switches to allow Case, Accent, Kana and Width sensitiveness (see screenshots below). We highly recommend using a case insensitive collation. Also, should you wish to extensively use Extended Unicode characters (Surrogates), we recommend using one of the “_90” collations. Please see the SQL Reference manual to understand what option is best for you.
Localizing your Team project
Once you have understood how to implement such customizations you’re half way through. A few more tips below:
- I’m stating the obvious here, but because you would be extensively editing the whole set of files that constitute the Process Template, please make sure your translations are consistent across all files, especially when it comes to field names.
- Speaking of Field names - in the Beta 2 release of Team Foundation you will not be able to rename all fields. There are about 20 of them which are considered to be “core” (such as “ID”, or “Title”) and simply cannot be renamed. Don’t worry though, it’s already been fixed in post Beta 2 builds. Please refer to the Beta 2 Extensibility Kit for the list of such fields.
- If you want to create Reports which are international-aware, so that they display dates/times/numbers in the end users’ preferred way (based on their IE settings), you would have to leave the “Language” property in the report designer blank.
- As you have read in Amy’s “Team Project Customization Overview”, you can customize the Team Project portal, therefore you can localize it. Each Process Template uses a specific Sharepoint Services Site Definition for this. If you want to leverage a localized Sharepoint Services Site definition you have two possible options: below I’ll only explain in detail the easy one, mainly because the usage of the Sharepoint Services Site templates has changed in post Beta 2 builds, so you may want to experiment on this, but won't be able to create a localized Process Template that works when we release. For that you would have to use the upcoming June CTP. So currently, you would have to:
-- Follow the steps suggested by Amy and Ling in previous posts to export Process Templates, customize/localize Work Item Types, Queries, Instances, Document Templates, etc., and re-import them.
-- Among other files, you will have to edit WssTasks.xml located in the Wss folder, by changing the following line
<site template="TFS#0" language="1033" /> to <site template="STS#0" language="1041" />
This will inform the server that the Team portal needs to use the standard Sharepoint Services Site definition instead of the one provided with Team foundation. And of course it will also point to the Japanese version. If you have installed another language pack you will have to change this language attribute to the appropriate LCID
This is how a Team portal would look like before the change
And this is after (notice I have not changed anything else other than the line above)
This approach has the drawback of loosing the customizations we provide with the default Team Foundation Project template. But, again, customizing/localizing the Team portal will be much easier from the next CTP release onwards.
Of course when the product will be released we will have localized Process Templates for each of the 9 languages mentioned above - it might be a great community exercise to have those translated in other languages that we do not plan to release.
Please let me know if you want to be involved.
As always, your feedback and questions are more than welcome.
Aldo Donetti
International Program Manager
Visual Studio Team System
