Editing Multilingual User Interface (section)

== Implementing ==

Basic tasks to support/implement MUI:

* Use LoadString in the application code to read resources; it uses user preference, system settings to read resources that are in the language that is most preferred by the user based on availability
* Author resource source code (RC) for each language; recommended to store each language in a separate RC file
Upon completing the basic tasks, an application is MUI-enabled. But there are other features of MUI that an application can optionally take advantage of.

The basic tasks imply storing all languages in the resources of the application binary -- which means it is ''not'' language neutral. This structure provides all runtime localization benefits of MUI and simple, single-file deployment but does not allow for deployment flexibility that MUI provides. In order to take advantage of the deployment flexibility:

*Configure the application binary project to exclude all LS resources -- making it the LN file
*Configure project(s) to build each language to a resource DLL; named the same as the LN file + "''LCID''.mui" -- MUI files
*Deploy/install MUI files in same directory as the LN file

To store localized assets in formats other than resource, the application must implement a mechanism for reading assets at runtime based on the language preference system settings (see GetThreadUILanguage). In other words, the application loads UI assets based on the system language preference settings without using LoadString. The application might leverage the MUI file-per-language location and naming convention by using GetFileMUIPath.