From ____ to ____ to MUI to ELS -- World Ready @ the PDC!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/10/30 03:00 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/10/30/9023605.aspx

If you are the PDC in Los Angeles, you may have seen Yaniv Feinberg from the Globalization Services team and Erik Fortune from the Multilingual User Interface team, who did a 75-minute presentation entitled Windows 7: Writing World-Ready Applications. It's description:

This session centers on globalization features for Windows 7, including sorting and string comparison, locale support, and coverage for new languages, with an eye to helping developers extend their applications to a global user base. This session introduces the Extended Linguistic Services API, the next step in the evolution of globalization support for Windows developers. This session also covers the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) technology inside Windows 7 and .NET, and walks you through an end-to-end look at how to make your application MUI-enabled so that you can easily take your application worldwide and extend your customer base into new language markets.

If you are not at PDC or you were off "picking your nose in Milo's meadow" when this presentation was done, then never fear, they recorded it and you can watch it off Channel 9 right here.

You do have to have Silverlight 2.0 installed to watch the video and no download is provided (this was disappointing for me since I always tended to download .WMV files so a) I can watch them at high speed, and b) I can put them on the Zune and watch them without being tied to my machine -- though obviously this is neither Yaniv's or Erik's fault!).

The presentation is worth a view as it introduces, describes, and demonstrates ELS (Extended Linguistic Services), a framework that in Windows 7 will provided features like language detection, transliteration, and script detection -- doing so, in a way that is in just about every way superior in both simplicity and range of supported languages than virtually all previous Microsoft forays into these areas.

It also has a good piece about MUI and deployment, which are things I have talked about here many times in the past.

With that said, I do have couple of criticisms, which I will mention so that you know about them, and also know that I still think the presentation is a worthwhile watch:

• The title sucks. Writing world-ready applications involves a lot more than a new feature that provides a framework with some cool useful services, and the ability to switch user interface languages. If your application fully integrated both of these items, it would not be properly "World Ready". And one intro slide in each of the two parts is not enough. The title should really have been better.
• The mix sucks, because the integration of the two features is poor, something that is especially noticeabl when they are presented side by side -- e.g. ELS is designed to be incredibly simple with a minimal API set, while MUI has so many components that the old lady who lived in a shoe would feel your pain trying to figure them all out. The differences like that are very obvious if you look at the presentation.
  

1. People like me who think that both of them are so cool they are the bees knees, the wasps nipples, and the erogenous zones of every insect in North America;
   
2. People who think that one is so frigging cool that it could reverse global warming, while the other is such a waste that they wondered whether they should throw it in a compost bin or a recycling bin;
3. People who think that both are so useless that they'd ask for a refund on the PDC of there wasn't a Mark Russinovich talk scheduled later on.
4. People who were expecting a talk that goes over globalization and localizability, core things that if you don't have then neither of these features they talk about are all that interesting.
   

Now of those three categories, #3 is not important since they probably wouldn't have walked into a talk with the title this one had, and #4 is basically my first criticism.

#1 is a group I can really identify with since I am in it, and I suspect that many of the people who follow this blog also put themselves in #1 either a little or a lot.

But that category #2 is a real one, and the packaging of these two separate presentations under one title without trying to handle the issue in the session description or with a few words is just weird. And not just in a "men are from Mars, women are from, Venus" kind of way. I mean a "MUI is from Mars, ELS is from Alpha Centauri" kind of way.

Probably there was no way they would have gotten two full slots at PDC, but they should have handled the packaging better.

With all of the above said -- this one talk is two solid, independent presentations, either one which is likely interesting enough to you to make watching the whole thing worthwhile even if you qare in that category #2.

Or, if you are an MUI-o-phile, Erik starts at 26 minutes  and if you want to know about ELS then Yaniv kicks off the whole thing from the beginning, and the Q&A starts at 55 minutes or so. And there is a mention of me and my blog at around 54 minutes if people are into SiaO spotting. :-)

I am glad that this presentation was made more widely available beyond the PDC, as it is the first view of some very cool new things.

And I'll be talking about ELS further at some point, no doubt.

SPOILERS: in the Q&A, Yaniv confirms that ELS is Windows 7 only, and Erik confirms that the new MUI feature of a per-process UI language is also Windows 7 only (the latter is really the only Win7 specific MUI info mentioned in the presentation, but is also very cool. Erik, don't bury your lead next time!).

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Dana on 30 Oct 2008 2:03 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Oct 2008 7:55 PM:

Richard on 31 Oct 2008 9:23 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 31 Oct 2008 10:04 AM:

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