Walking off the end of the eighth bit

My recent post Keyboard UI in setup hoist by its own petard?, or more specifically one of the screenshots in that post, caused dmanchester to ask:

In that second screenshot of the Vista installation, what's going on with the window title and the "Enter your language..." text? Are those placeholders for yet-to-be-localized text? Does the use of Cyrillic and Greek in the placeholders help confirm fields' Unicode compatibility?

This is of course a pseudo-localized build, which is a great mechanism to find issues without waiting for the localized strings to come back from the folks doing the translation...

There are also many other issues that can be found by extending the principle to locales, which is the point that Shawn raises in his post Pseudo Locales in Windows Vista Beta 2.

Shawn's post links to the MSDN topic that talks about these three locales that you can enable in Vista with a bit of registry tweaking. Though to be honest I would also recommend in addition to the entries documented to be added to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Locale, also adding the entries to the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Language key as well. I'm just saying. :-)

(The reversal of all the latin letters is something I provided the data for, though it was originally Shawn's idea!)

In any case, the MSDN topic mentions without explaining that you can test the "9-bit locale identifiers" [sic]. Some of you may recall when I talked about this issue with Primary Language Identifiers over a year ago in Why do LCIDs skip around so much?, where I pointed out the very real problem that bad app development that is not properly parsing LCIDs can cause.

And these three pseudo locales all have LCIDs that can help testing her, so I heartily recommend trying out these locales in you applications to see how things work for you. There is very little room left in the 8-bit PRIMARYLANGID space, so future versions may start to really expose deep-seated application bugs....

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