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Locale Builder v2.0 for Windows 8.1/Server 2012 R2 Released!

  • Article

There's a new Locale Builder for creating your own custom locales live on the Download Center at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41158.  The direct link to the setup exe is https://download.microsoft.com/download/C/6/8/C68BDDC5-50CB-47E1-9EF7-B5651D68BDDF/LocaleBuilderSetup.exe 

Locale Builder 2.0 is designed primarily for Windows 8.1/Server 2012 R2, including a few new data fields for those locales.  The constructed locales might work OK on previous versions, or they could have slightly strange behavior.

"Locales" are what Windows uses to provide date formats, time formats and the like for users and applications.  So things like clocks and number formats in Excel.  These are values you might need to write a letter or run a report and have the right format for the date.  Locales are a subset of the common data that applications use for day to day formatting.  Other strings you might see on the computer are done by either the application or operating system localization, which beyond what the Locale Builder was designed for. 

What can you do with the Locale Builder?

  • Change data for one of the built-in Windows locales.  Maybe you have a different preference or your region is adopting a new currency.  Locale Builder helps you customize the formats, behavior, and display names of existing locales.
  • Create standard locale patterns for your enterprise.  Maybe your company always wants dates to look like 2013-11-18, or have the same date format on your lock screen.  You could modify a locale and deploy it across the machines you manage.
  • Add a new calendar to your locale.  Maybe you want access to the Japanese calendar, but your user locale is English (United States).  You could add the Japanese calendar to your en-US locale (note that right now the string localization would still be Japanese).
  • Create a new locale.  I'd use Hawaiian as an example, but Windows 8 has haw-US, so maybe you'd prefer Fijian (Fiji) instead?  Create an appropriate locale for your language and region and then share it with your friends, coworkers, university, etc.  There're hundreds, if not thousands, of locales we don't have data for so we've made it possible
  • Make a variation of an existing locale.  Maybe you'd like to use English in Fiji (en-FJ) instead of en-US or en-GB.  Or Chinese in the US, or any other combination.
  • Build locales for all the EU languages for all of the other EU countries.
  • Copy data from a CLDR locale to a Windows locale.  We added a few in Windows 8.1, but if you want more, you could use CLDR data to seed your locale

Hope you find the new Locale Builder 2.0 useful!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2014
    It seems that previous versions of Locale Builder has been removed, and version 2.0 does not support older versions of Windows, such as Windows 7.

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2014
    Locales built with LB 2.0 may succeed on earlier versions, but yes the tool requires Windows 8.1

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2015
         

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2015
    Hmm, can't figure out how to make the blog do it, but if you install the font and follow the font fallback instructions in the blogs.msdn.com/.../klingon posts, then you can see the previous user's comments :)

  • Anonymous
    October 31, 2016
    Hi - after locale is built and installed on a win server 2012R2 Std. I can't see it in the region selector - did I miss something?

    • Anonymous
      November 21, 2016
      Roman, does calling GetLocaleInfoEx() return information for that locale (if you can test that). Or a .Net app requesting new CultureInfo(locale)? It is possible that something is misconfigured or otherwise failing validation of the custom culture.
    • Anonymous
      November 21, 2016
      I just made a quick additional locale on 2012R2 (tlh-US), and one thing that jumps out to me is that for a new specific culture (language-region), you also have to have a neutral language locale. So if you add tlh-US, you'll also need to add tlh. tlh-Piqd-US would require tlh-Piqd and also tlh to be installed.If you only install the "neutral" tlh, (or tlh-Piqd), it won't show up in intl.cpl because we only allow "specific" locales that also have region information for user locales. You have to install tlh-US (or tlh-Piqd-US) type specific locales. And the latter won't show up if the neutrals aren't installed because they'll fail validation when trying to load them.Hope that helps!
      • Anonymous
        November 28, 2016
        Hi Shawn - now it is working - thanks. Initially I wished to crate a new locale on a SharePoint web application. Unfortunately the custom locale is not recognized by SharePoint and not enumerated on the locale selector in regional settings. If somebody knows how to populate a new custom locale to SharePoint...ThanksRoman