Windows has supported multiple UI languages for over a decade, but nobody knew it

In the early days of Windows, there was a separate version of Windows for each language, and once you decided to install, say, the French version of Windows, you were locked into using French. You couldn't change your mind and, say, switch to German. The reason for this is that there were bits and pieces of language-dependent information stored all over the system.

One obvious place is in file names. For example, a shortcut to the calculator program was kept at %USERPROFILE%\Start Menu\Programs\Accessories\Calculator.lnk on US-English systems, but %USERPROFILE%\Startmenü\Programme\Zubehör\Rechner.lnk on German systems. The name of the physical file system directory or file was displayed to the user as the name of the menu item. This means that if you started with an English system and simply replaced all the user interface resources with the corresponding German ones, you would still see a folder named Accessories on your Start menu, containing a shortcut named Calculator, even though they should now be displayed as Zubehör and Rechner.

The registry was another place where language-dependent strings were stored. For example, file type descriptions were stored in plain text, which meant that if you installed an English system, then HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\txtfile had the value Text Document, and that's the value shown to the user under the Typ column even though the user had switched the user interface resources to German.

For Windows 2000, an effort was made to move all language-dependent content into resources so that they could be changed dynamically. If you need to store a language-dependent string anywhere, you can't store the string in plain text, because that would not survive a change in language. You have to store an indirect string and convert the indirect string to a real string at runtime, so that it mapped through the user's current user interface language. It was quite an effort identifying all the places that needed to be changed to conform to the new rules while still ensuring that the new rules were backward compatible with old code that followed the old rules.

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