Internationalization

When dealing with distributed teams, one of the important considerations is language and culture across continental boundaries. Team Foundation Server is not designed to work with multiple languages; you can install only one per server. If you try to get language-specific versions of Team Suite accessing a Team Foundation Server that has been set to a different culture and language, you may get unexpected results such as error messages and other user interfaces (UI) in other languages. As a best practice, we greatly encourage that you match up the language of your clients with the server.

Important

Here is an important consideration. You can install the English version of Team Foundation Server on Windows Server 2003 localized to most languages (such as Korean). However, you cannot install a localized version of Team Foundation Server without its localized Windows Server equivalent. For example, if you are installing the Korean version of Team Foundation Server, you must install Team Foundation Server on a Windows Server 2003 also localized to Korean.

The following matrix explains what language combination of servers are supported:

Open table as spreadsheet

Team Foundation Server	Windows Server 2003	Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 2
English version	English version	English version
English version	Localized version	Must be English version
Localized version	English version	Must be localized to same language as Team Foundation Server
Localized version	Localized (must be localized to the same language as Team Foundation Server)	Localized (must be localized to the same language as Team Foundation Server)

Important

Visual Studio 2005 is currently available in nine different languages including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

The configuration of the collation settings in SQL Server 2005 (shown in Figure 15-21) facilitates support for multiple languages. Collations determine the ordering of your data. Note that the incorrect collation settings will prevent your Team Foundation Server from functioning properly. Depending on what language you are working with, you need to make sure that you consider a collation that handles accents, kana, and width sensitivity. (Some languages use glyphs that rely on double-byte character sets.) In general, you should use case-insensitive collations.

Figure 15-21

Here is a matrix chart to help you choose the right collation settings for Team Foundation Server based on internationalization requirements:

Open table as spreadsheet

Language	Condition	Collation Setting
US-English	Default installation	SQL Server collation (for backward compatibility)
US-English	Extra U.S. English characters	Latin1_General
English	Default installation	Windows collation
Other Languages	Default installation	Windows collation
Other Language	Extra Unicode support (for example, Unicode CJK Extension A characters, Unicode Surrogates, etc.)	"_90" collation. For example, "Japanese_90"
Japanese	Hiragana/Katakana support	Enable Kana and Width sensitivity

Important

Note that Team Foundation Server does not support binary, binary2, case sensitive, and accent insensitive collations.

You can customize other aspects of the team project, such as the reports and the team portal. In your custom report, simply set the Language property to blank to allow Internet Explorer to dynamically change the culture of the report (in terms of dates and time).

To change the language of the team portal, you can use the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 Language Template Pack, which you can download at www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=&DisplayLang=en.

Deploying it is quite straightforward; simply install it on the same machine as your Team Foundation Server. You can then create a custom process template to bring up the foreign language features. In WssTasks.xml, simply change the site template to:

 <site template="STS#0" language="1031" /> 

This example creates a Team Portal with a German language template. Upload your custom process template, create a Team Project, and dort ist es (there it is) - your German team portal appears. Simply change the language attribute to the appropriate value to change languages. Here is a matrix with the languages supported by Visual Studio 2005, and the values that need to be added in to effect a change:

Open table as spreadsheet

Language	Locale ID
Chinese (People's Republic of China)	2052
English (United States)	1033
French (France)	1036
German (Germany)	1031
Italian (Italy)	1040
Japanese	1041
Korean	1042
Spanish (Spain - Traditional Sort)	1034

For a complete list of Locale IDs, please refer to the Web page at www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/lcid-all.mspx.

Important

To learn more on how you can internationalize Team Foundation Server (and specific steps on how to change the language of the Windows SharePoint Services portal), refer to the informative blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/team_foundation/archive/2005/05/09/415838.aspx.