Localizing Your Application

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Localization involves the process of adapting your application for the countries or parts of the world in which it will be used. In addition to translating the strings in a user interface, localization might involve changing the software itself where necessary. For example, you might have to move control buttons to adapt to increased string lengths after translation, or so that the user interface will make sense grammatically in another language.

Most localization efforts run into a variety of difficulties that result in higher than necessary costs for localizing a product and a product that is more difficult to use than it should be. Often, these issues can be tackled at the source, by designing and writing software that takes into consideration some basic localizability guidelines. Establishing and implementing localization guidelines might increase the quality, accuracy and user-friendliness of the international product version. Moreover, it could significantly reduce the cost of localizing your application into different languages.

In This Section

  • Developing Office Developer Applications
    Office XP Developer provides productivity tools to build applications faster, integration tools to make applications work seamlessly with data and the Web, and management tools to simplify deploying and managing the applications built with Microsoft Office.
  • Designing Applications
    Spending time on design can mean the difference between delivering the application customers want on time and wasting valuable time backtracking to solve problems.
  • Programming Concepts
    There are many facets to programming, from writing solid code to custom classes and objects to the Windows API and other dynamic-link libraries.
  • Deploying Your Application
    When it's time to deploy your Microsoft Office application to users, you have many alternatives, ranging from copying a file to a common share on a network server to building a full-fledged setup package.