What's in a name? (once more)

>not all of Microsoft's employees who are involved with software development understand about localizability

Agreed. In fact, the statement should be "not all of Microsoft's employees who are involved with software development understand the importance of localizability". A case in point is the set of new technologies that comprise .NET 3.0. I am talking about WPF, which as of now does not support complex script rendering. The new flagship graphics suite Expression from Microsoft is based on WPF. Naturally that also does not support Indic (complex script). I wish I were wrong here.

-Pavanaja

Actually, I believe you are mistaken on that point. Avalon (WPF) supports complex scripts and even complex OpenType features more fully than anything else in managed or unmanaged code that is currently available.....

I still don't understand why it is necessary to translate such internal account names at all. To me (as a german-speaking user), the name "NT-AUTORITÄT" is in no way "better" or "easier to understand" than "NT AUTHORITY" -- it doesn't _mean_ anything; it is just a piece of techno-gibberish.

IMHO, you're dead wrong.  One common reason for a simple table is so that us poor devs can actually have a fighting chance to figure out what's different between different systems.  This table (combined with some hint as to how the table was generated) goes a long way to making our software actually work.

Since the table:

1) provided no such hints

2) did not even mention the rename issue

3) did not hint that there were more

I disagree with the premise of the argument you are making, Peter.

A fuller example with a code sample that explained ALL the issues, I would support. What they provide now is incomplete, unhelpful, and misleading...

This post has me thinking about some code I have written that calls CreateService. Most of the services I create end up with an NT AUTHORITY\Network Service start identity. I have been passing the string NT AUTHORITY\Network Service based on documentation available at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/base/createservice.asp

and

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/base/networkservice_account.asp

Which seems to indicate that NT AUTHORITY\Network Service is not ever localized. My question is - should I be using a SID (S-1-5-20

) instead?

According to MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/base/localservice_account.asp):

"The name of the account in all locales is NT AUTHORITY\LOCALSERVICE"

It says the same thing about Network Service as well (here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/base/networkservice_account.asp)

And again about LocalSystem (here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/base/localsystem_account.asp)

So who is right?

Well, "NT AUTHORITY" is often localized , even if account names are not. So it seems like it would make sense to always use the SIDs....

I may agree with Markus that "NT-AUTORITÄT" is no better or worse than "NT AUTHORITY" but that presumes that everyone is comfortable with English here. To which I guess I'd raise two objections:

1) Not everyone wants to see English -- some look at it is an American company that is insensitive to their language;

2) Not everyone even understands English;

The common phrase people like to use is about "the next million users" and the most obvious source of that pool of people who would either buy Windows or buy something else may have as their only blocking factor the fact that they really don't know English at all.

So although I agree with the sentiment that Markus raised and that both "NT-AUTORITÄT" and "NT AUTHORITY" both look like arbitrary symbols that have no real meaning, thus translatation takes meaningless and turns it into translated meaningless, I can't ignore that translated meaningless acutally DOES mean something to some people -- it means the effort is being made.

Which to some people means everything. :-)

> So it seems like it would make sense to always use the SIDs

Can you confirm whether that's actually true, though? Because the CreateService documentation is pretty clear that you can use hard-coded strings, which is what I've been doing. If it is true, then perhaps we to amend the documentation?

Well, the Books Online article is telling the truth about the fact that some of these service names are localized, and you cannot use MUI to test out whether this is the case, since they are not localized in the MUI version when it is installed atop English as this post indicates.

But perhaps in the localized versions where this is an issue either (1) the code is smart enough to accept both names, or (2) the localized names are just for display within the UI but would never be used in code, or (3) the CreateService et. al. docs are wrong.

And then mix with this the fact that (4) in Vista every version of Windows is in its on way an MUI version which may change the lay of the land here entirely....

Then, consider the fact that (5) the results may be different across different versions.

Finally, (6) the rename issue masy still be an issue here.

Given all of these issues, it seems until the whole issue is clarified that one should either:

a) be willing to test all of these scenarios in localized versions of NT4, Win2000, Winxp, and Vista, or

b) one should use the SIDs for self-defensive purposes.

But I agree that the docs are very unclear about this issue and should be clarified to avoid the confusion. I will stand by my advice as the guaranteed way to avoid problems in light of unclear documentation, but I much prefer to push things as pure best practices rather than scare tactics/fear of the unknown....

2008/06/11 You almost want a cease-and-desist order put out about the docs

2008/05/06 By some accounts, the names can be changed