Developing International Software [Paperback]

In today’s global economy, there are clear advantages to developing applications that can meet the needs of users across a wide variety of languages, countries, and cultures. Discover how to develop for the whole world with the second edition of this classic guide—now completely revised and updated to cover the latest techniques and insights, and designed for anyone who wants to write world-ready code for the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and Windows XP platforms. It explains how to localize applications easily and inexpensively, determine important culture-specific issues, avoid international pitfalls and legal issues, use the best available technologies and coding practices, and more. It covers all of the essentials for developing international software—while revealing the hard-earned collective wisdom of the Microsoft international teams. Topics covered include:

• Introduction: Understanding internationalization and designing a world-ready program
• Globalization: Unicode; locale and cultural awareness; text input, output, and display; multilingual user interface (MUI)
• Localizability: Software localizability guidelines, mirroring, and content localizability guidelines
• Localization and testing: Localization, testing for world-readiness, sample international test cases, and testing localizability with pseudolocalization
• Tools and technologies: Graphics Device Interface Plus (GDI+), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), Microsoft Office, MLang, Microsoft Layer for Unicode (MSLU), The Microsoft .NET Framework, OpenType® Fonts, RichEdit, Microsoft SQL Server™, Text Services Framework (TSF), Uniscribe, Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET, Extensible Markup Language (XML)

INCLUDED ON CD-ROM: A fully searchable electronic copy of the book Code pages, documentation, and a case study Sample code, including Windows Platform SDK samples and .NET samples International tools and utilities

A Note Regarding the CD or DVD

The print version of this book ships with a CD or DVD. For those customers purchasing one of the digital formats in which this book is available, we are pleased to offer the CD/DVD content as a free download via O'Reilly Media's Digital Distribution services. To download this content, please visit O'Reilly's web site, search for the title of this book to find its catalog page, and click on the link below the cover image (Examples, Companion Content, or Practice Files). Note that while we provide as much of the media content as we are able via free download, we are sometimes limited by licensing restrictions. Please direct any questions or concerns to booktech@oreilly.com.

Dr. International's identity is one of the most closely guarded secrets of Microsoft. Since (1) he has the support and help of the entire Windows International Division, (2) he is very knowledgeable about i18N issues, and (3) he gets to choose what questions/answers are posted, he can maintain the illusion of knowing everything.