Learn how to design, develop, and test international software for the Windows 2000 and Windows XP platforms.

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)