Foreword

I'VE BEEN WORKING IN LOCALIZATION my entire career, and I've seen countless examples of how amazingly hard it can be to create a world-ready Windows product. The early days of 32-bit Windows saw a definite lack of support for international products. Since then, so many APIs related to internationalization have been added, duplicated, replaced, and deprecated in various products and platforms that almost nobody can acquire the skills needed to know for certain if their product is properly adapted to an international market.

Of course, nobody was feeling the pain of the situation that Microsoft created more than Microsoft itself. And true to form, the company created a grand vision: a brand new development framework and runtime environment, where support for all things painful and bug-causingincluding such areas as memory management, security, and even internationalization were considered from the start. We now know the result of this effort as the .NET Framework.

And what a result it is! The difference between creating internationalized applications in .NET and Win32 is like night and day. There simply is no comparison! The amount of minute details that are abstracted away by the .NET Framework is absolutely staggering.

Still, as it turns out, Visual Studio .NET does not provide a "Make My Application World-Ready Wizard." Nor will it anytime soon. Despite the complexity hidden by the .NET Framework, the software architect and developer still requires a good understanding of the issues involved in creating a culture-independent and localizable product. There simply hasn't been any one single, overviewable source of the most essential information.

That's exactly why I'm proud of my involvement in the effort behind this book. I hope that this book can have the same impact on world-ready applications as Code Complete has had on producing quality code in general or Writing Secure Code has had on producing trustworthy applications. If this work fulfills my hope, well, time will tell. The potential is certainly there. Now it's up to you to read, learn, practice, and deliver.

Jesper Holmberg,

International Project Engineer,

Core Operation Systems Division, Microsoft Corporation