Microsoft SilverLight Globalization and localization Interview Questions & FAQs

Questions and answers for Microsoft SilverLight Globalization and localization.

5. Globalization and localization

5.1 What UI languages does Silverlight provide?

In the Beta, the installation and control runtime are available in English. Developers may provide an in-page "Get Microsoft Silverlight" experience for their customers in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Korean, Japanese, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese. Support for additional languages is planned to follow.

Silverlight Beta 1 does not support end to end application localization. This support will be introduced for Beta 2.

5.2 Does Silverlight support East Asian languages?

In the Beta, there is full support of East Asian languages via TextBlock element. TextBlock supports and uses the East Asian fonts installed on the user's machine. In addition TextBlock supports surrogate content as well as handling proper line breaking for East Asian text. For text input, Silverlight 2 Beta 1 supports East Asian text entry via an IME.

5.3 Does Silverlight support bi-di or complex scripts?

In the Beta, Silverlight does not support the bi-directionality, shaping or justification support required by complex script languages. A developer, however, may utilize the rendering of the browser (DHTML) or text-graphics as alternative approaches.