Office 11, Registry, Localization .....
I have been working / preparing a proposal for the localization aspects of the addin we are developing for outlook. There are quite a few interesting things which made me think about what all ways office knows about what locale it needs to be running on, about how it picks up the language in which the UI has to be displayed and so on ....
Interestingly this is some of the titbits of information I could gather.
The language and locale-related information about the user's computer are present in the SkuLanguage, LanguagePack, InterfaceLanguage, and Location elements.
A developer can use this information to decide which relevant localized satellite assemblies or what ever localized components to be installed on the user's computer. For example, Microsoft Office 2003 uses these elements in the following way:
- SkuLanguage and LanguagePack determine which services are installed. For example, if the SkuLanguage is English, Office installs dictionaries for US English, UK English, Australian English, and so forth.
- Location determines the services that are activated. For example, if the Location is the United States, only the US English dictionary is activated for searching.
- InterfaceLanguage determines the language used for registration registry entries and messages.
The information is present in the following registry keys
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\LanguageResources
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\LanguageResources
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared