This week we released, both to the MSDN subscriber download site and to public downloads, a language pack for Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1.  This language pack includes Japanese, French and German resources that can be added to your English Team Explorer Everywhere installation.  After installing them, TEE will use the appropriate language based on your operating system locale.  Of course you can override it if you want (there’s a link to http://www.eclipse.org/babel/ in the instructions for more on this). There is actually only one language pack and it includes all 3 additional languages.  However, there are 4 download pages for it.  The only difference in the download links is that the download page and instructions are in different languages.  They will all actually install the same stuff on your machine.  Here are the 4 public links:

• English
• French
• German
• Japanese

The new language packs require that you’ve already installed Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1. I’m really excited about this step.  When we acquired the TEE product a couple of years ago, it had never been localized.  And in Martin’s words, “Considering the size of the codebase that came over from Teamprise and the sheer volume of hard coded strings this was a marathon effort led by Rick on our team but involving many other teams across the company and we also enlisted the help of our MVP and DPE community to provide some real-world validation of the translations before release and incorporated all of their feedback.”  It was a significant effort.  The first part of the effort was released in SP1 where we enabled localization but didn’t actually release any new languages.  Now we’ve released the first wave of languages. Based on user feedback and demand, we’ll look at releasing more languages in the future.  We’ve chosen a slightly different loc model than we’ve traditionally used for VS.  Rather than go invest in all 9 that VS does (some of which get very low usage), we’re going to start with these four and add more as the demand appears.  It is possible, though not trivial, for community localization of TEE.  We had great success with this with Team Web Access a couple of years ago where the community created 12 localizations beyond what we shipped.  TEE localization is a bigger undertaking but if you are interested in it, let us know and we can get you some information on how to tackle it. Thanks and I hope you enjoy these new languages!

Brian