by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/01/09 06:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/01/09/1438426.aspx
Alan Adams asked in the Suggestion Box:
You had mentioned getting to some more MUI API topics. One area I'm not finding much information on is whether and how well the choice of using (Vista-level) MUI support works for things like shell extensions.
As a stand-alone application, the manner in which MUI is intended to work is clear, even if my application can only support (or is configured to support) a language different from the Windows OS user interface language.
But as a shell extension (or network provider, or other extensibility/integration interfaces), in order to present my application's UI and menu items in the language my application is installed for / configured to use, just continuing with existing satellite DLL approaches seems better suited than adopting MUI.
(Either that, or I have to up-end much of the existing code in order to restrict all needed resource resolution to a thread where I can control the MUI thread language, without affecting the display of Windows itself and/or other applications I'm not intending to affect.)
The purpose of MUI is to try to work within the framework of supporting the user's language choice. Now obviously any application can set a thread preferred UI language in its UI threads if it needs to override that choice due to not having the language in question.
But even if one does not do this, the implicit assumption above that code which used to work will now fail in Vista is most likely incorrect. Hopefully Alan can comment here and explain what in particular seems to be failing here.
Situations like the one mentioned here relate to when there are no resources at all, not when resources exist but they may not be the user's selected resources. But if anything, more attention has been paid to backcompat support in MUI in Vista than we have seen in prior versions, not less.
So on the whole, I think the easiest way to see what works is to try it and then say something about the results. Or, absent that, an effort to give specific more examples of what one is doing/building and what one is worried about....
Alan? :-)
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