by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/07/16 16:23 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/07/16/667622.aspx
Picture a Friends episode - the one entitled The One With The Morning After. Chandler, Monica, Joey, and Phoebe are all trapped in the bedroom. Trapped because Ross and Rachel are outside the door, and after Rachel said she needed a break, Ross had a one night stand. The dialog:
RACHEL: Y'know what, I want you to leave! Get outta here!
ROSS: No!!!
RACHEL: Just get out! Now!!!
ROSS: No! No! I wanna stay. I wanna talk about this.
RACHEL: Okay! All right! How was she?
CHANDLER: Uh-oh.
ROSS: What?
RACHEL: Was she good?
JOEY: Don't answer that.
RACHEL: Come on Ross! You said you wanted to talk about it, let's talk about it!! How was she?
ROSS: She was...
JOEY: Awful! Horrible!
CHANDLER: She was not good. Not good.
JOEY: She was nothing compared to you.
ROSS: She, she was different.
JOEY: Ewwwww!
CHANDLER: Uh-oh.
RACHEL: Good different?
ROSS: Nobody likes change.
Ross is right, nobody likes change. Especially developers.
But while we were on a break waiting for Vista to come out, all kinds of interesting little items have been going on.
Now keep in mind that to make developers willing to accept change, you need to provide all the following:
That last point is for example the whole reason that MSLU was created, come to think of it.
And it is the reason why the new in Vista Ex versions of the NLS API functions would not really be embraced by developers, even with easy LCIDToLocaleName and LocaleNameToLCID to convert between names and locale IDs, if the conversion function only exists on Vista.
But that conversion is not only for Vista alone now -- because the Microsoft National Language Support Downlevel APIs 1.0 package is now available!
The DLL (nlsdl.dll), contains the following functions:
and, in a special effort to avoid the problems that existed in the first version of idndl.dll, redist executables built for x86, ia64, and amd64 are all available in the package too.
At present, the package only goes as far downlevel as XP and Server 2003, though I know there has been some grumbling about that from people to lower the floor as the team works so hard to raise the roof. If you are a developer and you have one of those scenarios in front of you, then feel free to mention your scenario here....
It has never easier to make like The Zombies and ask What's Your Name? Who's Your Daddy? as it will be with this package out there.
Enjoy!
This post brought to you by જ (U+0a9c, a.k.a. GUJARATI LETTER JA)
referenced by
2007/06/11 LCID vs. Powerman and the Locale-name-go-round
2007/03/19 A way better model for features, part 2