Using Multi-Language User Interface Features

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You can register a Windows Media Center application so that it supports a multi-language UI. The display name and description for the application dynamically changes on a multi-lingual system when the user changes the operating system UI language in the Region and Language Control Panel. This method is only valid for locally installed managed-code assemblies.

The title and description attributes of the application and entrypoint elements in the registration XML can be dynamically changed as follows:

  1. Create a series of multi-lingual resource strings and include them in a binary that is included with your application.

    • The resource strings must be stored as Win32 resources.
    • Managed resources are not supported.

  2. Register your application using the RegisterApplication methods or the RegisterMceApp.exe utility. The syntax for referring to a multi-lingual resource in the entrypoint title and description attributes is as follows:

    @<resourceFile>,-<resourceID>
    • <resourceFile> is a fully-qualified path to the binary that contains the Win32 resource strings. This path can be an absolute path such as c:\Program Files\MyApp\myResources.dll, or it can use environment variables such as %ProgramFiles%\MyApp\myResources.dll.
    • <resourceID> is the exact ID in the string table of the resource binary that contains the string for the attribute.

The following code shows an example of registration XML:

<application title="@c:\Program Files\MyApp\myResources.dll,-101"…>
    <entrypoint title="@c:\Program Files\MyApp\myResources.dll,-102"
                description="@%ProgramFiles%\MyApp\myResources.dll,-103"…
    <category…/>
    </entrypoint>
</application>

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