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User Language and Other Settings
When a user first acquires a Windows 8 device or installs Windows 8 on a machine, it will likely be
configured for their country of residence. However, many users speak multiple languages irrespective of
where they live and might want to work with Windows in a particular language that has nothing to do
with their location. For this reason, you always want to think about the user’s preferences separately
from the actual location of the device, applying the user’s preferences to how your app displays
information but using the physical location to control the services you use and other more functional
aspects.
Languages and other preferences are configured through Control Panel > Clock, Language, and
Region. Here you can add languages and select your primary one (see Figure 17-8), change input
methods, specifically set your location (a country or territory), and set date, time, number, and currency
formats (see Figure 17-9).
FIGURE 17-8 Managing and selecting a language in Control Panel.
It’s a good thing there are globalization APIs, because dealing with all the variations here would be
quite a chore otherwise! (Note that changes to the formats in Figure 17-9 will affect only those
Windows Store apps that are running in the language you’re configuring; each set of custom formats is
particular to a language.)
The basic details of the user’s settings are available through the
Windows.System.UserProfile.-GlobalizationPreferences object and the classes in the
Windows.Globalization namespace. GlobalizationPreferences just provides a handful of properties.
Four of these, calendars, clocks, currencies, and languages are each an array of strings (an
IVectorView to be precise) with the user’s preferred settings in order of preference. In the case of
languages, it contains a list of BCP-47 language tags.
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