by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/03/30 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/03/30/10289279.aspx
The other day in How to localize a product very wrongly like, I made a fairly candy ass statement:
...the simple fact that either:
*The fundamental difference between the way different units of measurements are defined in different locales cannot be handled by localization, or
*This difference is exposed but is done so in a way that was either not properly described or not properly tested.
I can't say for sure which one, though I have my suspicions.
Especially since there are also some unrelated UI problems that make localization of the UI difficult.
Perhaps someone on the Shell team can weigh in on the actual root cause of this bug that apples to Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, and (according to BrautKrautBleibtBlauKleid) Windows 8 in the Consumer Preview.
I honestly didn't know which it was.
Now my charge about the poor localizability of the user interface is true.
But perhaps it was unfair to assume that the team that made one mistake also made the other....
Especially since of my very first readers Raymond Chen cleared up the mystery and implicitly pointed out my assumption was wrong:
It's actually case 2 (the conversion formula is localizable, but localization was not done).
Well that really puts a cat among the pigeons!
I took a quick look and although I looked at the resources in calc.exe.mui, how localization of the conversions might be done seemed like it might be complicated.
I didn't find the hidden cache of formulas, for example.
I'm going to have to ask some people, and to try and find the localization instructions.
How else to judge how, or if, the decision was made, explicitly?
Worst case, the Supreme Court of SIAO can judge who dropped the ball here....
Best case, maybe we could get the bug fixed some day!
I can't hold out too much hope for a fix in v.Next given how little time is left and this is pretty much entirely unanticipated work. But perhaps one day....
Jeroen on 30 Mar 2012 8:26 AM:
It looks like the formulas are stored in an XML file embedded as a resource named IDS_TEMPALTE_XML.
Notice the typo in the name, maybe that is the cause of the bug?
Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Mar 2012 1:16 PM:
You may be givng them too much credit, Jeroen. :-)