Globalization Services

Globalization Services exposes core globalization support for languages and regions to enable creation of globalized applications that apply to a broad range of international customers. This technology supplies the globalization infrastructure to support a Windows user experience that is consistent, and linguistically and culturally appropriate. Globalization Services includes the following technologies:

• Extended Linguistic Services. Provides a range of text-based services for Windows developers (including language detection, transliteration, and other core linguistic functionality) and the platform and interfaces for applications to consume services easily, as well as interfaces to allow developers to add services of their own.
• International Components for Unicode (ICU). Provides a mature, widely used set of open-source globalization APIs. ICU utilizes Unicode’s vast Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) as it’s data library, providing Globalization support for software applications. ICU is widely portable and gives applications the same results across on all platforms.
• National Language Support. Provides international data and APIs to support date, time, and calendar formatting, keyboard layouts, sorting behavior, aspects of text enablement, and other core locale information.
• Spell Checking API. Provides an API for developers to consume spell-checking capability to check text, get suggestions, and maintain settings and user dictionaries. Developers can also create spell checkers that are integrated into the spell-checking framework as providers.