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Orlando Day 2 (Tuesday)

Yong Rhee had some very good questions come at his Deploying Windows MUI (Multilingual User Interface) breakout session.  One of the best questions, is one I get all the time.  What is the difference between a regular version of Windows and the MUI version?  Let it first be noted that Windows XP English (as well as any other version of Windows XP) has multilanguage support right out of the box.  What I mean by this is that Windows XP has everything you need to display and create text in multiple languages (including Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Thai, Hindi, as well as German, French, Russian, Spanish and over 100 other languages). 

What the MUI technology adds is the capability of the user to choose what language to display the operating systems menus, dialogs, system messages and help. That means that you can have one machine that can behave as if the English, Japanese and German localized versions where installed on it at the same time.  This allows large corporations to roll out the same worldwide image with a single install job. Local users can then select the user interface language or it can be set by Group Policy for Organizational Units. To find out more about MUI version of windows go see my FAQ at: www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/lipfaq.mspx

Speaking of MUI, today, Wednesday June 8, Michael Jorden (no not Michael JordOn) is speaking about the MUI capability of Office and how to deploy this along with the Windows MUI technology to make management of the multilingual desktop in a global enterprise more cost effective.  His session is DSK345 -- Deploying Office 2003 in a Multilingual Environment and it will presented Wednesday, June 8 from 3:45-5:00 pm in room N220 A.   Hey maybe we will see you at the presentation.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2005
    Speaking of MUI, how come there's no MUI for SP2 ?
    Isn't there a risk to break apps run in 'extra' languages if the resources in these languages don't match the ones in the updated (SP2) original language ?

    I'm looking forward to reading your explanation.

    TIA.

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2005
    Serge,

    Sorry for taking so long on this. You are partially right, if there are no localized strings for new stings in XP SP2, they will not come up in the UI language of choice, but it won't break the application. What it will do is display the new string in English.

    Now, to address your question about MUI packs for XP SP2, in fact there are several of them. There is one for Windows Media Player 9 series, one for Movie Maker and one that is a Cumulative Help update for Window XP.

    You can get all of these online. A good starting point that has links to all three of these is http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/relnotes/muixpsp1.mspx#EDAA">http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/relnotes/muixpsp1.mspx#EDAA. It is located on my website http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev.

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2005
    The URL above is not coming out right. It should be http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/relnotes/muixpsp1.mspx#EDAA

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2005
    Dear Dr,

    Thanks for your reply.

    It's good to know there's a fallback mechanism for strings. I wondered what would happen for other kind of resources such as dialogs and menus. For menus, I assume new items will simply not show up in translated versions.
    For dialogs, it might be a somewhat worse since there's likely code tight to new dialog controls. If these controls don't exist in a transalted version, this code might goof more or less badly.

    But maybe it's only me...

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